Milindapanha

The dialogue opens with a king who has run out of opponents. Milinda, learned in the arts and sciences and delighting in debate, has silenced the teachers of his realm and asks whether anyone remains who can answer him; he is brought to Nagasena. Their first exchange sets the theme of the whole work. Asked his name, the monk replies that he is called Nagasena, but that the name is a designation only, for no person is found here. The king objects: then who wears the robe, who keeps the precepts, who could murder a monk if there is no one there. Nagasena answers with the king's own chariot. Is the pole the chariot, the axle, the wheels, the frame, the yoke.

Is the chariot something other than these parts. It is neither, the king concedes, and yet chariot is not a false word: it is a designation dependent on the parts being assembled. Just so, Nagasena concludes, the person is a designation dependent on the aggregates, and the point is sealed with a verse from the canon in which the nun Vajira says the same to Mara. From there the questions multiply: on rebirth without transmigration, answered with the flame lit from another flame and the milk that becomes curds; on why the liberated still feel bodily pain; on how a deed long past can bear fruit. The form is catechism sharpened into philosophy, and the similes have travelled far beyond Buddhism.

Milinda is the Pali rendering of Menander, the Indo-Greek king who ruled from Sagala, modern Sialkot, in the middle of the second century BCE, one of the successors of the Hellenistic kingdoms that Alexander's campaigns left in Bactria and the Punjab. Menander is solidly historical: his coinage is abundant, some of it bearing the Buddhist eight-spoked wheel, and Plutarch preserves the tradition that at his death his ashes were divided among the cities of his realm as a wise ruler's relics, a story with an unmistakable Buddhist shape. Whether the historical Menander held these conversations, and whether Nagasena existed at all, cannot be established; the dialogue as we have it was composed later, in the scholarly consensus within a century or two either side of the turn of the common era, perhaps in the Greek-influenced northwest, and the Pali text was subsequently expanded, with the later books generally regarded as additions.

A parallel version survives in Chinese translation as the Nagasena Bhikshu Sutra, shorter than the Pali and witnessing an early common core. The Theravada tradition embraced the work: Buddhaghosa quotes it as an authority, Burma counts it within the Khuddaka Nikaya of the canon, and Sri Lanka and Thailand hold it just outside the canon while according it near-canonical respect. Its meeting of Greek king and Buddhist monk has fascinated modern readers as a documented crossing point of the Hellenistic and Indian worlds.