Nāgasena

One anonymous book, kept in Pali and in a shorter Chinese version, is the only source for Nāgasena. In the Milindapañha, known in English as The Questions of King Milinda, he is the Buddhist monk who answers Milinda, the Greek king Menander. Menander ruled from Sāgala, probably today's Sialkot in Pakistan, between about 165 and 130 BCE, and is a figure of record, known from his coins and from Greek writers. Of Nāgasena there is no historical evidence outside the book and the legends that grew from it. The tradition places him in the same century as the king; scholars hold that the book grew over time around an older core, and that its dialogues were probably set down around the beginning of the Common Era.

What the book tells of his life is a frame for the debate. Milinda, it says, harassed the monks with questions none of them could answer, so the elders on a Himalayan slope asked a god, Mahāsena, to be reborn among men and refute him. He consented and was born as Nāgasena, son of the Brahmin Soṇuttara, in the village of Kajaṅgala at the foot of the Himalaya. His teacher Rohaṇa brought him into the order as a novice. The book tells that he learned the whole Abhidhamma, the scholastic part of the Buddhist scriptures, by heart on hearing it once, and that he became an arahat, one who has reached the goal of the path.

The Nāgasena of the dialogue argues by comparison. Asked who he is, he tells the king that his own name points to no lasting self, and when Milinda objects he asks whether the king's chariot is its pole, its axle or its wheels. The chariot, Milinda concedes, is a name for the parts together, and so, Nāgasena answers, is "Nāgasena". The method serves him through the later books: puzzles in which the Buddha's recorded words seem to contradict each other, each resolved by argument and simile. Behind it stands the teaching of the Theravada, the elders' school of the Pali scriptures: there is no permanent self, yet actions bear fruit and rebirth continues.

The book ends with the king handing his kingdom to his son and becoming a monk. Legends kept Nāgasena alive long after it. A Thai tradition holds that he had the Emerald Buddha made at Pāṭaliputra, and East Asian Buddhism counts him among its Eighteen Arhats. The book that holds him stands outside the Pali scriptures in Sri Lanka and Thailand and inside them in Myanmar.