The religion of India is not one but many and for historical reasons it has been given one name by the western people. It is a system of many beliefs and philosophies like a giant University catering to as many student population coming from different walks of life, wanting to do different things.
The same can be said about the ancient religions of Europe, Asia and Middle East, which had much in common, just like the different religious ideas of India get clubbed under Hinduism.
Gnostics were people who were in Middle East, Egypt, Greece, Italy, Turkey and Asia Minor, and who were preaching Christ's teaching but were not considered to be fellow Christians by the early Church Founders. All the Gnostics teachings, libraries and some places of worships were burnt, ransacked and taken over. In a systematized way with the propaganda by the Church Fathers, they were also considered Heretics.
Recent discoveries of texts in the farmlands of Egypt, called Nag Hamadi, which survived the burnings, exposes a contrary picture and the real truth behind what laid behind Gnostics.
The text by King, The Gnostics and Their Remains, talks about this:
"Basilides in order to invent something more refined and plausible in the Gnostic speculative philosophy pushed his investigations even into the Infinite. He asserted that God, the uncreated eternal Father, first brought forth Nous or Mind; and Mind, the Logos, Word; this in turn, Phronesis, Intelligence; whence came forth Sophia, Wisdom, and Dynamis, Strength." Irenæus understands Basilides as making a Quinternion of Beings or Personal Intelligences external to the Godhead: but Bellermann with more reason takes them as signifying personified attributes of the Supreme forms of his working internally and externally. According to this explanation Basilides would only have borrowed his system from the Kabbala; it is however equally likely that he drew the whole from a much more distant source, and that his "Untreated" and "Quinternion" stand in truth for the First Buddha and the successive Five.
"When the uncreated eternal Father beheld the corruption of mankind, he sent his Firstborn, Nous, into the world in the form of Christ, for the redeeming of all that believe in him out of the power of those who fabricated the world--namely, the Demiurgus and his Six sons, the planetary Genii. Nous appeared amongst men as the Man Jesus, and wrought miracles. This Christ did not die in person, but Simon the Cyrenian, to whom he lent his bodily form, suffered in his stead; inasmuch as the Divine Power, the Nous of the Eternal Father, is not corporeal, and therefore cannot die. Whoso therefore maintains that Christ has died is still the bondman of Ignorance, but whoso denies the same, he is a freeman, and hath understood the purpose of the Father." From this tenet the Basilidans got the opprobrious title of "Docetae" (Illusionists). Similarly the pious Brahmins explain away all such of their legends as are inconsistent with our notions of divine dignity by making them all "Maya" (illusion). The same is also the doctrine of the Koran (Cap. iv.) upon this point: "And for that they have not believed upon Jesus, and have spoken against Mary a grievous calumny, and have said, Verily we have slain Christ Jesus, the Son of Mary, the apostle of God; yet they slew him not, neither crucified him, but he was represented by one in his likeness; and verily they were disagreed concerning him, were in a doubt as to this matter, and had no true knowledge thereof, but followed only an uncertain opinion. They did not really kill him, but God took him up unto himself, and God is mighty and wise."
The system just described coincides to a remarkable degree with the Brahminical, where the First Principle produces in succession the Five Powers--Mahasiva, Sadasiva, Rudra, Vishnu and Brahma--who are held by some for mere attributes of the Godhead; by others are taken in a materialistic sense for Æther, Air, Fire, Water, Earth. But possibly, as Mosheim so long ago maintained, the whole Gnostic system is derived, not from the Kabbala, nor from the Greek philosophy, but from the theosophy of the Brahmins.
