All of them show the beginnings of social diversification, and in all there were thinkers of genius. There were the philosophers and scientists in Ionia: Heraclitus, Pythagoras and Anaxagoras. The Buddha’s contemporaries included Jains, Ajivikas, sceptics, rationalists and atomists. All of them question the nature of the mind and the physical universe. In China, too, this is the period known as the Age of Philosophers, the ‘Hundred Schools of Thought’, with Daoists, Mohists and Confucius’ followers such as Mencius.
