The Questions of King Milinda, Part II

[paragraph continues] The story of a discussion between Nâgasena and Milinda is no doubt, if the arguments in the Introduction to Part I are of any avail.
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Dialogues of the Buddha. Thomas William Rhys Davids. The Tao Te Ching. The Buddha's Way Of Virtue. The Canon of Reason and Virtue. Jaina Sutras, Part II. Texts from the Buddhist Canon. The Dhammapada and Sutta-Nipata. Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment. The Satapatha Brahmana, Part I. Translated By Rabindranath Tagore. Manual Of Zen Buddhism. Dialogues Of The Buddha. How to write a great review. The review must be at least 50 characters long. But it seems that M. I had not noticed this reference to the character in our historical romance.

There is no allusion to our book, and the passage is only interesting as showing that the memory of king Milinda still survived in India at the time when Kshemendra wrote in the eleventh century A. On page we read:. This quotation is very interesting. For the lines quoted do not occur in our text. Both these references are entirely legendary. In order to magnify the importance of the great festival held in Ceylon on the occasion referred to, it is related that certain famous members of the Buddhist order came, attended by many followers, through the sky, to take part in the ceremony.

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In that book the residence of Assagutta is not specified--it is his friend Roha n a who lives at the Vattaniya, and the locality of the Vattaniya is not specified--it would seem from the statement at I, 25 part i, p. But geographical allusions are apt to be misleading when the talk is of Bhikshus who could fly through the air. And it seems the most probable explanation that the authors of these verses, in adopting these names, had the Milinda story in their mind.

XIX, verses , where all the fourteen names of the visitors from India are given without any details as to the districts whence they came , and the corresponding name is also Uttara there. The above sets out all the new information I have been able to glean about the Milinda since the publication of the Introduction to the first volume of this translation.

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I have to express my regret that a long and serious illness, culminating in a serious accident that was very nearly a fatal one, has deprived me altogether of the power of work, and not only prevented me from carrying out this perhaps too ambitious design, but has so long delayed the writing of this Introduction. Only one of the preliminary habours to the intended Introduction was completed. It is now possible to judge from this analysis of the questions proposed, what were the subjects on which differences obtained among the early Buddhists.

There are a number of points raised in Tissa's discussions which are also discussed by the author of the Milinda. This is especially the case with those points which Moggali-putta Tissa thinks of so much importance that he discusses them at much greater length than the others. But the outlines of it are pretty well established, and there is nothing to show that the Indian notions on the subject, apart perhaps from the subsidiary beliefs in Karma and transmigration, were materially different from those obtaining elsewhere.

Already in prehistoric times the ancestors of the Indian peoples, whether Aryan by race or not, had come to believe, probably through the influence of dreams, in the existence inside each man of a subtle image of the man himself. This weird and intangible form left the body during sleep, and at death it continued in some way to live.

It was a crude hypothesis found useful to explain the phenomena of dreams, of motion, and of life. And it was applied very indiscriminately to the allied phenomena in external things--the apparent life and motion, not only of animals, but also of plants and rivers, of winds and celestial bodies, being explained by the hypothesis of a soul within them. The varying conditions and appearances of the external world gave rise to the various powers and qualities ascribed to these external souls, and hence to whole systems of polytheism and mythology. And just as the gods, which never had any existence except in the ideas of their worshippers, were born and grew and changed and passed away with those ideas, so also the hypothesis of internal souls had, no less in India than elsewhere, a continual change, a continual development--and this not only as to ideas on the nature and origin of the internal human souls, but as to their relation to the external souls or gods.

And when speculation, which loved to busy itself with these mysterious and fanciful hypotheses, had learnt to conjecture a unity behind the variety of external spirits, the relation of men's souls to the one great first cause, to God, became the subject of endless discussions, of varying views invented to harmonise with varying preconceived conceptions. When Buddhism arose these hypotheses as to 'souls,' internal and external, formed the basis of all the widely differing, and very living and earnest, religious and philosophical speculations in the valley of the Ganges, where there then obtained that marvellous freedom of thought.

It contains the views of the Buddha set out, as they appeared to his very earliest disciples, in a series of conversational discourses, which will some day come to hold a place, in the history of human thought, akin to that held by the Dialogues of Plato. In it are set out sixty-two varieties of existing hypotheses, and after each and all of them has been rejected, the doctrine of Arahatship is put forward as the right solution. The sixty-two heresies are as follows:. People who, either from meditation of three degrees, or fourthly through logic and reasoning, have come to believe that both the external world as a whole, and individual souls, are eternal.

People who, in four ways, hold that some souls are eternal, while others are not. Those who hold that while the bodily forms are not eternal, there is a subtle something, called Heart or Mind, or Consciousness, which is.

Milinda Panha-1

From the fear that if they express a decided opinion grief at possible mistake will injure them. People who think that the origin of things can be explained without a cause. People who believe in the future existence of human souls. Eight different phases of the hypothesis of an existence between consciousness and unconsciousness after death. People who teach the doctrine that there is a soul, but that it will cease to exist on the death of the body here, or at the end of a next life, or of further lives in higher and ever higher states of being. People who hold that there is a soul, and that it can attain to perfect bliss in this present world, or in whatever world it happens to be The scheme is not intended as a refutation of the views, as a whole, held by any special school or individual, but as a statement of erroneous views on two special points, namely, the soul and the world.

However this may be, we find an ample justification in this comprehensive and systematic condemnation of all current or possible forms of the soul-theory for the prominence which the author of the Milinda gives to the subject. The discussion in the Milinda as to. Our Milinda ascribes the verses,.

And the two dilemmas, Nos. The general result of a comparison between these two very interesting books of controversial apologetics seems to me to be that the differences between them are just such as one might expect a from the difference of date, and b from the fact that the controversy in the older book is carried on against members of the same communion, whereas in the Milinda we have a defence of Buddhism as against the outsider.


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    • The discussion of these details gives no opportunity for the enthusiastic eloquence of the author of our Milinda, and the very fact of his eloquence argues a later date. But there can be no doubt as to the superiority of his style. It includes a number of works which are not translations at all, and translations of a large number of others which do not belong to the Pi t akas.

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    Translated under the Eastern Tsin Dynasty, Specht's papers to be mentioned immediately, it seems possible that there are really three Chinese books on the same subject. If not, we have, then, still another Chinese book on Milinda. Beal's own translation, i,