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In 1978 Thomas Hahn published an article on “The Indian Tradition in Western Medieval Intellectual History” in which he identified statements about Indian “sages” found in Christian literature written from the third through the fourteenth centuries. He demonstrated that the image of Brahmans (or Gymnosophists) changed during this period from one of misguided ascetics, as in Augustine’s City of God, to a widespread medieval view of them as philosophers who acquired wisdom, devotion, and virtue without need of Christian revelation. Hahn argued that this final image recurs so widely as to constitute “a unified tradition of thought about these virtuous Indians.”¹