The Collaborative International Dictionary
Gymnosophist \Gym*nos"o*phist\ (j[i^]m*n[o^]s"[-o]*f[i^]st), n. [Gr. gymnosofisth`s; gymno`s naked + sofisth`s philosopher; cf. F. gymnosophiste.] One of a sect of philosophers, said to have been found in India by Alexander the Great, who went almost naked, denied themselves the use of flesh, renounced bodily pleasures, and employed themselves in the contemplation of nature.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
Wiktionary
n. One of a school of ancient Indian ascetic philosophers, reported in antiquity, who wore little clothing; a mystic.
WordNet
n. member of a Hindu sect practicing gymnosophy (especially nudism)
Usage examples of "gymnosophist".
As to the religious scruples of the Gymnosophist and his disgust at the sight of bleeding flesh, I should be more affected thereby if I had not sometimes asked myself in what essentials the suffering of grass, when it is cut, differs from the suffering of slaughtered sheep, and if our horror in presence of murdered beasts does not arise from the fact that our sensations belong to the same physical order as theirs.
But the gymnosophists are cited at the time of Alexander as an ancient sect already divided into Brachmans and Samaneans.
Around all these autochthons, real and self-imagined, were a score of other figures not less absurd—officers dressed as women and women dressed as soldiers, eclectics as fraudulent as the autochthons, gymnosophists, ablegates and their acolytes, eremites, eidolons, zoanthrops half beast and half human, and deodands and remontados in picturesque rags, with eyes painted wild.
A subscription was being raised for a course of lectures by variously enlightened persons, and among the mediums and gymnosophists who were awaiting the Society's decision, Drinkwater found the name of Dr.
In the dark solitudes of India also, though some philosophers go naked, and are therefore called gymnosophists, yet they make an exception in the case of these members and cover them.
And the Indian gymnosophists, who are said to philosophize in the solitudes of India in a state of nudity, are its citizens.
I am a knight-errant, and not one of those whose names Fame has never thought of immortalising in her record, but of those who, in defiance and in spite of envy itself, and all the magicians that Persia, or Brahmans that India, or Gymnosophists that Ethiopia ever produced, will place their names in the temple of immortality, to serve as examples and patterns for ages to come, whereby knights-errant may see the footsteps in which they must tread if they would attain the summit and crowning point of honour in arms.
To each memorable image you attach a thought, a label, a category, a piece of the cosmic furniture, syllogisms, an enormous sorites, chains of apothegms, strings of hypallages, rosters of zeugmas, dances of hysteron proteron, apophantic logoi, hierarchic stoichea, processions of equinoxes and parallaxes, herbaria, genealogies of gymnosophists- and so on, to infinity.