This year, I began a slow, deliberate journey into Western philosophy. It had long been on my list of things to do. I had a general familiarity with the Western thought, but a systematic study is something that I wanted to do. After all, I call myself a philosopher. I decided to begin with the oldest voices that are there. Not through commentary or classroom notes, but through the original texts. I wanted to meet the thinkers, not their interpreters. I chose two books for this study – Penguin’s Early Greek Philosophy and Oxford University Press’ The First Philosophers by Robin Waterfield. And so I began at the beginning: the Pre-Socratics. I expected curiosity. I did not expect recognition.

The names came like waves—Thales, Anaximenes, Xenophanes, Heraclitus. And in them, I heard something oddly familiar. Not just in tone, but in texture. The questions they asked felt close to the ones I had heard growing up. What is the world made of? What lies beneath change? And what is the nature of unity, of difference, of permanence? These are the same questions that shape the Upanishads, the Samkhya, even the hymns of the Rig Veda. But here they were, voiced not in Sanskrit but in Ionian Greek.

I. Thales and the First Gesture

Thales proposed that all things originate from water. At first glance, it seems like a strange claim. But it wasn’t a scientific statement. It was a metaphysical gesture—an attempt to find unity beneath the flux. It was an attempt to find the origin of things. The answer is not as important as the question itself. Where does everything come from?

Thales is also remembered as one of the Seven Sages of Greece—the Heptá Sophoí. I did not know that Greeks also had Seven Sages similar to the Sapta Rishis of India. Each of them had a maxim, and the one often attributed to Thales is “Know thyself.” That alone should tell us he wasn’t just observing the world. He was asking what it means to observe at all. He is said to have predicted a solar eclipse, diverted a river to help an army cross, and once used his understanding of the seasons to corner the market on olive presses—just to prove that a philosopher could be rich if he wanted. A thinker, a doer, a sage.

II. Anaximenes and the Breath of the World

Anaximenes replaced water with air. He watched condensation and rarefaction and imagined a world constantly transforming. It was still crude, but the spirit of it was different from static building blocks. Reading him, I thought of prana vayu from the Upanishads—the breath that animates being. The moment when breath leaves, and life follows.

He was a Milesian too, like Thales, and possibly his student or at least his intellectual descendant. This idea of a primal substance evolving into everything else was a kind of early cosmology, rooted in observation but reaching beyond it. Air, for Anaximenes, wasn’t just an element. It was a unifying medium, stretching from the divine to the human. A way of seeing continuity in difference.

III. Heraclitus and the Fire That Is Always Becoming

I had heard the line before: “You cannot step into the same river twice.” Usually, it came up in casual conversations about change. But in the context of Heraclitus‘s fragments, it felt heavier. Almost sacred. He wasn’t trying to be clever. He was pointing at something he found obvious: everything flows, everything changes. Nothing stays. “All is fire,” he wrote.

Reading that, I thought of Agni from the Vedas—the fire that witnesses, that consumes, that transforms. Heraclitus felt less like a logician and more like a seer. He wasn’t offering unity, but gesturing toward something deeper than things themselves.

“What struck me after reading these three was that they identified the same three elements—Water, Fire, and Air—that appear in the Indian Panch Tatva as fundamental to all existence.

IV. Xenophanes and the Gods We Make

Then I got to Xenophanes. He was different. He didn’t talk about elements or change. “If oxen and lions had hands,” he said, “they would draw gods in their own image.” He questioned the gods of Greek mythology.

It was a refusal to worship mere projections. The sense that the Real cannot be fully captured in names or forms. Nama-rupa in Hinduism and later in Buddhism. Xenophanes hinted at a different kind of god. One unlike mortals. All-seeing, all-thinking. Not a pantheon of gods, One God.

V. A Shared Quest

I found that the early Greeks were not merely thinkers — they were seekers. They didn’t yet have temples of logic or systems of proof. They stood by rivers, in caves, on islands—asking the oldest questions. For me, they weren’t very far from the Indian rishis. Perhaps the difference lies in memory. We remembered ours as seers. The Greeks buried theirs beneath the rising tide of reason. But when I read them, I felt a kind of closeness. Not in their conclusions, but in their spirit.

And though much of what they wrote has been lost—surviving only in fragments and second-hand reports—their questions endure. Questions of existence, of essence, of what lies beneath. I look forward to continuing the journey.