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WorkNāgasena

The Questions of King Milinda

A Greek king in India questions a Buddhist monk, who answers him first by asking what a chariot is.

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Original title
Milindapañha
Original language
Pali

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Overview

Menander, a Greek king who ruled in the second century BCE from Sāgala, probably today's Sialkot in Pakistan, is the Milinda of this book, and the argument it records is one he loses. The Milindapañha, "Milinda's Questions", is an anonymous Pali dialogue. The questions are the king's; the answers belong to Nāgasena, a Buddhist monk whom the tradition places in the same century. The first book tells how Milinda, attended by five hundred Greeks, had worn out the famous teachers of his day, and how Nāgasena had been reborn to answer him and, as a novice, learned the Abhidhamma, the scholastic part of the scriptures, by heart on hearing it once. In their first exchange Nāgasena says his own name points to no lasting self. When the king objects, the monk asks whether his chariot is the pole, the axle or the wheels; the king concedes "chariot" is a name for the parts taken together, and Nāgasena answers that so is "Nāgasena". Later books take up dilemmas, places where the Buddha's recorded words seem to contradict each other, and resolve them one by one, and the last books gather long chains of similes. The text ends with Milinda handing his kingdom to his son and becoming a monk. Plutarch, the Greek biographer, records instead that Menander died in camp and his cities shared out his ashes. Scholars hold that the book grew over time: a Chinese translation made between 317 and 420 corresponds only to its opening parts, which they take as the older core. T. W. Rhys Davids, who translated the dialogue in 1890 and 1894, ranked it first among the prose works of India.

Key concepts

What does Nāgasena mean by name-and-form?

Name-and-form is his term for a living person: the mental side, which he calls name, and the bodily side, which he calls form, arising together. It does the deeds, good or evil, and by those deeds another name-and-form is born in the next life. It is not the same one reborn, but the new one is not freed from the old one's deeds either.

What is an arahant?

An arahant is someone who has completed the Buddha's path in this life and will not be born again. The book shows Nāgasena becoming one: his teacher chides him for carrying the Buddha's words in his head like a herdsman tending cows whose milk others drink, and that same night he reaches the state. For the king's questions the arahant is the test case, the person in whom the teaching's promises can actually be checked.

What are merit and demerit?

Merit is the good that a person's deeds store up, demerit the harm. Nāgasena tells the king that merit grows faster, and gives the reason in plain psychology: whoever does wrong feels remorse and admits it, so the demerit stops growing, while whoever does good feels no remorse, and gladness, then joy, then calm spring up from it, so the good keeps growing.

How is wisdom different from reasoning?

Reasoning gathers, wisdom cuts. Nāgasena takes the image from the harvest: reapers grip a bunch of barley in the left hand and cut it with the sickle in the right. Reasoning is the gripping hand, grasping the mind and what is in front of it, and wisdom is the sickle, which cuts off a person's failings.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

A Name for the Parts

If there is no lasting self, it seems that no one is reborn and no one answers for yesterday's deeds. The king presses exactly that, and the monk replies with a string of everyday comparisons.

Nāgasena's answer to the king's first question sets the terms for the whole book: a person is like a chariot, real enough to ride in, but nothing over and above its parts and the name they share. Rebirth works the same way. Nothing passes from one life to the next, as nothing passes when one lamp lights another, yet the new life is no stranger to the old, as curds are no stranger to milk. That is why deeds still count: the later life inherits what the earlier one did.

  • rebirth
  • karma
  • causation
  • moral responsibility
  • impermanence
  • death
  • analogy

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Squaring the Buddha's Words

The scriptures record sayings of the Buddha that seem to clash, and the king will not let a single one pass. Whether a teaching keeps its authority while its words disagree is the question underneath.

In the later books Milinda collects pairs of sayings and sets them against each other: an all-knowing Buddha who made his monks' rules only as needs arose, a compassionate one who admitted Devadatta, the monk who would split the Order. Nāgasena never drops either saying. He shows that each answers a different occasion or carries a different sense, so that a contradiction usually points to a reader who has not asked what a saying was for. The king, a born debater, is answered as a scholar, not obeyed as a king.

  • religious authority
  • knowledge
  • wisdom
  • virtue
  • monastic discipline
  • monastic life
  • renunciation
  • asceticism
  • Buddhism

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Nirvana and the Way to It

Nirvana cannot be seen, touched or produced, which makes the king doubt it exists at all. At stake is whether a goal no one can show is still worth a whole life.

Nāgasena grants the king's premises and refuses his conclusion. Nirvana has no cause, because nothing assembles it, yet a path leads to it, and it is known as the wind is known, by its effects rather than by a shape anyone could hold up. Whoever reaches it still feels a blow to the body but no anguish of mind. The road there is practical: mindfulness that keeps the good in view, wisdom that cuts, and a generosity so complete that the king, hearing the story of Vessantara, calls it excessive.

  • nirvana
  • liberation
  • meditation
  • mindfulness
  • spiritual attainment
  • spiritual practice
  • suffering
  • compassion
  • generosity

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Within this work

passages held
608
distinct concepts
601
by passages held, corpus-wide
#117

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “karma” and “rebirth”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 25 pairings. 87 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
karmarebirth20
causationkarma19
analogynirvana13
causationrebirth13
analogycausation10
liberationmeditation10
liberationrebirth7
meditationrenunciation7
causationnirvana6
karmaliberation6
liberationnirvana6
nirvanarebirth6
liberationrenunciation5
karmarenunciation4
meditationrebirth4
rebirthrenunciation4
analogyliberation3
analogyrebirth3
causationliberation3
karmanirvana3
nirvanarenunciation3
analogyrenunciation2
karmameditation2
meditationnirvana2
analogykarma1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

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