Our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of others. But we all look like the image they have of us. Something similar happens with civilizations and loves. The other helps us know who we are. The interfertilization of East and West is one of the great themes of Antiquity. The historian Fernando Wulff has brilliantly dedicated himself to him. A few years ago, he presented an unprecedented and bold hypothesis that surprised Indologists. The author of Mahābhārata knew the Iliad and incorporated some episodes from the Greek epic into the Hindu one. A line of research that no one followed, perhaps because of that gentlemen’s agreement that exists in scientific disciplines.
Today Wulff lives on a promontory facing the sea. Between the Pillars of Hercules and the Road to Damascus. Two small buildings house his library. One of them (where he sleeps) guards the treasures of Greece and China (spiced up with Japanese paintings). The second, at a certain protective distance, India and the cultures of Mesoamerica. The library as an atmosphere conducive to happiness and alchemy. That episode of interfertilization now has a new, broader version, in On the shores of time. A three-way story: three places and three views. The first is that of Emperor Trajan, who from the Persian Gulf dreams of setting foot in India and regrets not being able to do so due to his age. The second is that of a Chinese ambassador, Gan Ying, sent to Rome in the year 97, from China of the Han dynasty, to connect the two empires. The third belongs to Sahadeva, a fictional character, the youngest of the five Pāndava brothers, protagonists of the Mahābhārata. With these three threads, Wulff weaves a fabulous tapestry of Antiquity, in which Romans, Chinese and Indians dialogue, collide, dream, learn and trade, much more interwoven than is usually thought.
The episodes are varied and fun. A Buddha is unearthed in Egypt. A Hindu goddess appears in the ruins of Pompeii. The intrigues at Cleopatra’s court. Heracles shoos away the flies from Siddhartha. Strabo invites us to think of the world as an apple. Philo of Alexandria warns that every good man is free and that wise people are everywhere, even if they are few. Augustus visits Alexander’s tomb and refuses to see the Ptolemies. Euripides mentions the absurd exaltation of athletes and their unhappy old age. Dion Chrysostom criticizes the mendicant cynics. There is also room for culinary episodes. A flan with pepper, a recipe for oyster sauce, another to avoid lettuce gas. We came across Lucian of Samosata, one of the great humorists of antiquity, satirical genius and itinerant monologuist.
Under the influence of Buddhism, the Chinese always believed that wisdom was in the West. The west of China is India. In the second part of the book, Emperor Wu appears, the Tao te Ching and his distrust of the State, the military successes of Ban Chao, the sources of the Yellow River (turning point of the Sun and the Moon), the Jade Pond. The Empress’s Confucian advisor, Ban Zhao. The story of Zhuang Zi who, like the Greek Cynics, used animal parables to explain human affairs.
On the Indian side, Wulff tells us about Emperor Ashoka, his massacres and his repentance. From the coins of Menander, a Greek king taught by the Buddhist Nāgasena. Of asceticism and the poverty of those who live on grains that they do not cultivate. Of gods at the service of dharma. Of the prostitute who stopped the course of the Ganges. How Rome was subdued by a Hindu emperor. From the monkey army that goes to Sita’s rescue. From Apollonius of Tyana, who maintained that the Brahmins taught the Egyptians what they know. From the cosmological imagery of Krishna in the Bhagavadgītā. From Kautilya’s Instructions for Princes in Distress. Of the thread and tangle of reincarnations. Of the invention of poetry. Of the instructions to become invisible.
Endless stories, dreams and aspirations expressed with different symbols and metaphors. A book that follows in the wake of La India y el Catay, by Juan Gil, but written with greater freedom. Wulff knows how to keep the narrative pulse, he has the agility of the novelist and the rigor of the historian. And he concludes with an anthropological motto: no human culture is alien to us.
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