As the overview article showed, the Third Anniversary Discourse isn’t only about the first window, “languages and letters.” Jones moves on to a second window, “philosophy and religion,” and there turns the same comparative move toward an entirely different object. The result is a genuinely interesting mix of sharp insight and clear overreach.
Did Plato draw from the same well as India’s sages?
Almost as soon as he takes up India’s religion and philosophy, Jones writes (Japanese and English renderings of quotations throughout are ToL’s own):
Nor is it possible to read the Vedánta… without believing that Pythagoras and Plato derived their sublime theories from the same fountain with the sages of India.
The logic he used for language — a resemblance too deep to be accident or independent invention points to a shared source — is here extended to philosophy. Greek and Indian philosophy, on this view, didn’t just happen to arrive at similar conclusions independently; they must be connected somehow.
A table of matching gods
Jones takes the same approach to religion. He tries to line up correspondences between the gods of Greece and Rome and those of the Hindus — Neptune’s trident, Jupiter’s eagle, Bacchus’s satyrs, Cupid’s bow, the chariot of the sun on one side, matching elements among the Hindu gods on the other. He also invokes the Brahmans and the “Sarmanes” mentioned by Clement (Indian ascetics), disputing points of logic and the immortality of the soul, as a further parallel.
An overreach in practice — Odin and the Buddha
But with that same momentum, Jones steps into an association that is clearly a stretch.
Nor can we doubt that Wod, or Oden… was the same with Buddh, whose rites were probably imported into India nearly at the same time, though received much later by the Chinese, who soften his name into FO’.
He treats the Norse god Odin and the founder of Buddhism as one and the same figure. Seen from today, this is an ungrounded and considerably strained claim — no linguistic or historical connection between Odin and the Buddha has ever been established. What Jones leans on here isn’t the kind of concrete, checkable evidence he used for language — verb roots, grammatical form — but a much looser resemblance: “both are great religious figures.”
Further still — Rama and the Inca
The overreach doesn’t stop there. After discussing the Hindu god Rama, Jones goes on to note that it is “very remarkable” that the Peruvians (the Incas) boasted the same royal descent and styled their greatest festival “Ramasitoa” — and suggests that South America may have been peopled by the same race who carried Rama’s rites and legend to the farthest reaches of Asia. This speculation, linking the cultures of India and Peru across the Pacific, has no support from anything known in anthropology or history today.
Jones wasn’t entirely unaware, either
What’s striking is that Jones himself wasn’t completely blind to how risky this kind of comparison could be. Just before this, discussing someone else’s guess that the Athenians might have embellished their own myth of Pandion’s expulsion and Aegeus’s restoration using the Asiatic tale of the Pandu family and Yudhishthira, he writes that he “should not hastily deride” such a conjecture. Even as he adds that cautious qualifier, he goes on to make comparisons of his own that are just as bold, or bolder — Odin as the Buddha, Rama as the Inca. An awareness of the method’s risk, and the temptation to overstep it anyway, sit side by side in the very same writer. That’s another thing worth noticing in this address.
Summary
| Subject | Jones’s claim | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Sanskrit, Greek, Latin | Verb roots and grammatical forms match, sharing a common ancestor | Later verified and established |
| Plato/Pythagoras and the Vedanta | Possibly drawn from the same source | Remains an unverifiable suggestion |
| Greek/Roman gods and Hindu gods | Corresponding elements exist | Never concretely verified |
| Odin and the Buddha | The same figure | Unsupported, rejected today |
| Rama and the Inca festival | Spread by the same people | Unsupported, rejected today |
In a nutshell — Jones’s comparative method held up for over two centuries wherever it rested on concrete, checkable evidence like verb roots. Applied to the looser resemblances of myth and legend, that same method slid easily into overreach. This single address embodies just how hard it is to see where a checkable comparison ends and a groundless guess begins.