The Greek King and the Buddhist Monk

Maria Heim: The analogies are often quite meticulous, and they draw our eye to something in particular that Nagasena will take us through. And so in that sense, I think it enriches and enhances our perception and what we allow ourselves to notice. And that, of course, is a deeply Buddhist idea is how do we come to see the world more clearly or attend to the right kinds of things in the world? So we get this training of vision and, in terms of noticing the natural world, noticing different features of experience and then reading off of that landscape or those observations, how one should deport oneself in one’s practice. So there, I think you know, that I do see literature is drawing our notice and training our vision to find beauty and to notice the world more deeply, and that, I think, the text is trying to do throughout.

James Shaheen: Hello and welcome to Tricycle Talks. I’m James Shaheen and you just heard Maria Heim. Maria is a professor of religion at Amherst College. She recently published a translation of The Questions of Milinda, a foundational Buddhist text that tells the story of a Greek king and a Buddhist monk meeting and engaging in philosophical discussion. In my conversation with Maria, we talk about the literary and aesthetic qualities of the text, how treating Buddhist texts as literature can deepen our understanding, what we can learn from the text’s famous chariot analogy, and the philosophical work that metaphors and analogies can perform. So here’s my conversation with Maria Heim.

James Shaheen: OK, so I’m here with Maria Heim. Hi Maria, it’s great to be with you.

Maria Heim: Thank you, it’s great to be with you, James.

James Shaheen: So Maria, we’re here to talk about your new book, which is a translation of The Questions of Milinda. To start, can you tell us a bit about the book and how you came to translate it?

Maria Heim: Yeah, the book is a very well-known text known all over the world. It comes from the Theravada tradition and was composed, or at least the version that we have that I was working on, is in Pali. It’s a lovely dialogue between an Indo-Greek king and a Buddhist monk, and so it purports to be a conversation that took place in perhaps the middle of the first century BCE between a king who was an Indo-Greek king who would’ve been ruling in a satrapy in the wake of Alexander the Great’s penetration into northwestern India, a conversation that he had with a Buddhist monk. Now, we don’t know if this was actually a historical conversation or if these were actual historical figures, but the name King Milinda seems a lot like the king that we do know was an historical figure, Menander, or Menandros, who was a historical king who we believe his capital was at at Sagala. We think it was perhaps associated with the region that we now call, or the city we now call, Sialkot in Pakistan. And we know something of this king, that he was admired by the Greeks. He was a Greek king. And there are tantalizing, suggestive hints that he might have been interested in Buddhism. On some of his coins, for example, we see an eight-spoke wheel, which is a symbol of both Buddhism but also of a Chakravartin Empire. So it may have been either Buddhism or something like it. King Ashoka’s monuments are very much in that region. And so in any case, we do know that the Greeks and the Greek kings were interacting with Buddhists, that Buddhists had long been in this area of Gandhara, and this is a conversation that they’ve had.

Now, the text that we have that I translated is in Pali. But that’s another kind of curious it situation in that we don’t normally associate Pali with this particular region in India, that the real kind of home or the seat of Pali, this language and the scriptures, would’ve been Sri Lanka, and up in this region in Gandhara would’ve been Gandhari Prakrit. So scholars think that there was probably a Prakrit original of this text and that somehow we don’t know how we wound up with a Pali version of it. There’s also a Chinese version of it called the Nagasena Sutra. It’s quite different from the Pali version. And we do have that. Again, they’re two different texts really, but they seem maybe to be both having an origin in a text that’s now lost to us.

So it is something of a very unusual text. We don’t have any other text like this in the Pali canon or really an Indian Buddhist text in any tradition. And it’s something of a kind of classic of Indian literature. And it is certainly a very well-known text in Buddhism. I was asked to do it by Sheldon Pollock for the Murty Classical Library of India, which is a collection of a series or a library of ancient classics in multiple languages. So that’s how I came into it. And of course, there are several other translations. There are very, very good translations by T. W. Rhys Davids in, I think, the late part of the 19th century, and then the middle part of the 20th century by I. B. Horner. But it’s fair to say that every generation should have a new translation, a fresh translation of a text. Their language is older, and I think we’ve made some progress in Buddhist studies. So it was a real privilege to be able to have the chance to come to the text and try to render it in an idiom that makes sense to contemporary readers.

James Shaheen: So you mentioned Rhys Davids. This text was among the very first Buddhist texts to be translated into European languages, and it’s now one of the most famous Buddhist texts in the world. So what do you think contributed to this?

Maria Heim: Well, I think that it was deeply tantalizing for the early Orientalists to come across a text that purported to be a conversation between the Greeks and the Indians. I mean, that is just catnip for the kind of scholarship that was being done at that time, and of course it’s still really interesting for us. So I think when they found this, they were just really interested in that. One of the reasons, though, that the text has become so popular is that it has this very famous metaphor of the chariot, which you can find in almost any introductory Buddhist textbook. That metaphor itself has traveled very, very far into certain modern Western philosophy texts that are trying to make sense of Buddhist teachings of no-self. So that’s a contemporary thing that people are so interested in that particular metaphor, but that it comes from this text. Actually, it comes from the Pali suttas, and it comes from a nun who actually first came up with the metaphor of the chariot, and Nagasena cites her, but it is known largely through this particular text.

James Shaheen: Right, we’ll get to the chariot analogy in a bit. I’ll ask you more about that. But you also say that in addition to its philosophical value, the book has great literary value. It’s a literary classic, and you note that in its opening verses it promises to “stir the heart, please the ear and send shivers down the spine.” I don’t think that’s inaccurate. So can you say a bit about the literary and aesthetic qualities of the text?

Maria Heim: Yeah. I would say that the literary qualities of the text come from two main efforts that the text is engaged in. One is the story itself, I didn’t realize this until I was translating it, but how delightful the story is of the engagement between Nagasena and Milinda. It starts with a kind of what’s called a bāhirakathā, the backstory of how they met in a previous life, and there’s great dramatic buildup to this dialogue, and then there’s interesting ways that their narrative and the development of their relationship is referred to over the course of the whole text. So it’s a compelling story. That’s one area that I see a kind of delightful literary quality.

And then the other, or at least one of the other areas that I think there’s some real literary quality to the text is how deeply analogical the discussion is, and this has both philosophical implications and is doing philosophical work but also I think doing literary work, so that almost every question that Milinda asks Nagasena is met with an analogy or a simile. And so the chariot’s a good example, right? He won’t answer a question directly. He’ll say, “Well, let’s think about an analogy to help think about what a person is.” And so those analogies are doing heavy lifting philosophically. They’re often helping us understand rather difficult Abhidhamma terminology or ideas that are Buddhist philosophical ideas, but they’re often quite well elaborated so that we develop a whole visual image of nature or of a particular idea that is both deeply accessible, or makes the ideas that Nagasena is talking about accessible, but often quite beautiful as well. And so the text is, as you say, in the way that it introduces itself, it’s saying, be alert to the beauty here and to the pleasure that you can take in this text. And so when I was translating it, I was always trying to find that and do the best I could to kind of render it into English, because yeah, for me, it was just fabulous to be able to. I’m interested in both philosophy and literature, and so this text is really bringing the two together in a really delightful way.

James Shaheen: Yeah, the analogies are wonderful. I mean, they’re delightful to read. They keep you going. And Milinda says, “Give me another one,” every time he finishes one. So there’s no shortage of analogies. You say that treating the text as literature can help us deepen our perception. Could you say more about that?

Maria Heim: Yeah. The analogies are often quite meticulous, and they draw our eye to something in particular that Nagasena will take us through. And so in that sense, I think it enriches and enhances our perception and what we allow ourselves to notice. And that, of course, is a deeply Buddhist idea of how do we come to see the world more clearly or attend to the right kinds of things in the world?

The very last chapter of the text, it’s pretty clear that the Pali text that we have is a composite, that there were layers added to it over time. Some of the chapters are quite different from other chapters, and the very last chapter in some ways is a little bit disappointing because it reads just like a catechism, and it’s lost a lot of the dynamism and the complexity of the earlier chapters where there’s real debate and discussion going on, but to say something in support of this last chapter is the whole thing is analogies, where Nagasena is giving Milinda these various similes about how the aspiring arhat, or the yogi, the earnest practitioner, should be like the lotus in a certain respect, or have some of the qualities of an elephant in certain respects, and then it will elaborate this just like the classic metaphor of the lotus rising up out of the muck and being untainted by it, so too should the yogi be like the lotus. Just like an elephant walks gently, placing each footstep down carefully, so too should the earnest disciple walk carefully through this world. Like the water turtle who comes up and takes a breath and looks around, and if it sees anyone coming it dives back under again, so too should the yogi come out of his meditation and look around, and if he sees any defilements lurking, he should dive back into meditation. So we get this training of vision in terms of noticing the natural world, noticing different features of experience, and then reading off of that landscape or those observations how one should deport oneself in one’s practice. So there, I think that I do see literature as drawing our notice and training our vision to find beauty and to notice the world more deeply and that the text is trying to do throughout.

James Shaheen: OK, so let’s turn to the story itself. You mentioned the elaborate backstory, extending back many lifetimes. So can you tell us a bit about this backstory? What were Milinda and Nagasena’s interactions in previous lives?

Maria Heim: So the story starts with the person we now know as Milinda as a novice monk in a monastery and the person we now know as Nagasena as a senior monk in the same monastery. This is under the time of the Buddha Kassapa, so that takes us back to a previous Buddha time, out of mind, how Buddhist suttas often start way back in a distant life. This is a classic Buddhist narrative that everything that happens now had a backstory. We’ve met before. And it’s a funny little story. I mean, I was deeply charmed by the kind of gentle humor of this whole backstory.

In this story, the novice monk is not doing his chores, and he gets scolded by the senior monk and forced to sweep up the place. He sweeps up the monastery, and then on the basis of having done this chore, he goes to the banks of the Ganga River and says, “On the basis of this great meritorious thing I have done, I hope in birth after birth, I am reborn with somebody of a ready wit who can debate well.” The senior monk overhears him say that and says, “Wow, if this guy can have this amazing aspiration on the basis of doing something I forced him to do, I should also make an aspiration.” And so he makes an aspiration of “May I, in birth after birth, be able to answer any kind of question that is ever asked by this guy.” And so the senior monk then goes, and lifetimes pass, and he becomes Nagasena, the monk in the story, and the novice becomes Milinda. So this has been set up from a distant karmic past where they’re going to have this ability to have this debate.

Then the backstory spends a lot of pages on this last lifetime of how King Milinda is a powerful and respected king in this region, and he engages in a kind of classic trope in the Indian literature of the king who wants to debate philosophers have them come to his court and get into some interesting philosophical discussion. He can’t find anybody who meets his criteria of being a good philosopher, and so he goes around saying, “India is worthless. India is useless. It has no good philosophers.” And so in a kind of funny way, whenever he gets in one of these moods, the monks slink away to the Himalayas because they don’t have someone who can handle his questions. And then, there’s lots of material here, but the monks are getting quite worried about this, so they go to lord Sakka, the king of the gods, and they say, “We need to do something about this King Milinda who’s harassing us.” And Sakka says, “OK, well there is a certain deity up here in heaven who would be able to handle your King Milinda.” And so they go to that deity. Mahasena is his name, and they say, “Will you please be reborn as a human in order to help us fend off this king?” And Mahasena says, “Well, thank you very much, but the human world is really problematic, and I want nothing to do with it. Thanks, but no thanks.” And so they beseeched him, “Please, we really need to do something,” and so he says, “Well, OK, just maybe I might be able to take on this king.” And so he gets reborn into a Brahman family as an infant and named Nagasena. There’s a more of a story about how he comes to be drawn away from the Brahman family and becomes a monk and gets educated, and then we have the slow buildup to how King Milinda and Nagasena are going to meet and have this debate. By that time, the story has really built up a great deal of dramatic power where at the debate arena, it’s a very public affair, and King Milinda is flanked by his 500 Yonakas, or Indo-Greek Ionians, as they were, and Nagasena is flanked by 80,000 monks in his retinue. and then they meet. At this point, though, King Milinda is starting to get quite nervous. And so that very first chapter ends going into the discussion with Milinda sweating it out and quite nervous about what this encounter is going to be. He’s begun to sense that he’s finally met his match. So that opening story is quite a buildup. It’s quite funny, it’s quite charming, and I think it’s an important part of the text.

James Shaheen: Yeah, I was surprised at how elaborate that part was, I mean, the buildup to this. But when we meet Milinda, he’s quite skeptical of the monastic tradition, and he even accuses monks of being thieves in previous lives. But when he hears the name of Nagasena, he becomes terrified and breaks out into goosebumps. I think his hair also stands on end. To quote the text, “Like a god whose death draws near, Milinda was frightened, anxious, terrified, agitated, breaking out in goose bumps, distressed, confused, with his mind in turmoil and his thoughts awhirl, thinking only: May these people not come to despise me.” So we’re really getting into high drama here. Why is Milinda so afraid, and how does this set the stakes for their conversation?

Maria Heim: Yeah, so Milinda at this point has been portrayed, to use a kind of classically Greek idea, as someone with a great deal of hubris and pride, and he’s been going around telling everybody that these Buddhist monks have nothing to offer. He has debated other monks and pretty much prevailed. And this is a public thing, so we’ve been told about the numbers of people who were present there. And then when he hears the name Nagasena, which, they’re going to go right into the discussion of it in the chariot metaphor right after this, he gets really anxious as something strikes him. Whether that’s an echo from, I mean, the text doesn’t say, an echo from these distant lives or what, but he realizes that he’s in trouble and that he’s likely going to be deeply embarrassed. So that’s just a very cool moment for the Buddhists, to kind of celebrate that they finally got their guy who can subdue, if you will. So there’s a kind of contestatory nature of the opening part of the debate. Now, over the course of the whole text, it deeply softens. These two men become friends, and by the end of the text, Milinda’s arrogance is completely gone. And so there’s a whole narrative development with that. But at the beginning we have this lovely, wonderful kind of contest being set up.

James Shaheen: Right, so in one of the striking interactions between Milinda and Nagasena, Nagasena agrees to converse with the king if he converses the way scholars do, not the way kings do. So how do scholars and kings converse, and how does this establish the tone for their debate or the terms of the debate?

Maria Heim: Yeah, that’s a lovely moment, and a lovely moment actually for our time as well, that scholars need to debate on on a civil and open kind of ground, as Nagasena insists, and he says that when kings debate, if kings don’t like an answer, they can shout, “Off with his head,” and so he will not debate Milinda if those are the terms. Milinda quickly understands this, and he says, “OK, agreed. We will discuss this as though we are both scholars.” So that, I think, is an important moment in the text. And, you know, it does establish the nature of this as a genuinely open discourse, that Nagasena is definitely giving the party line of Buddhist doctrine, but he is also being pushed hard by Milinda. Milinda often has very good questions. Milinda will insist, “You can’t just tell me Buddhist doctrine.” He says, “A son will praise his father, and so you’re going to praise the Buddha, but I actually need to be persuaded with reasons and with analogies.” And he won’t let up until he is satisfied in the case of each one of the dilemmas that they discuss. So on both sides, we get a kind of civility and openness and efforts made to show that this is going to be a genuine, open conversation.

James Shaheen: Yeah, it’s kind of like, where’s Nagasena when you need him?

Maria Heim: Right, exactly.

Ad break-in: Coming up, Maria talks about the ethical and moral challenges that the text poses around renunciation, what we can learn from Milinda’s eventual conversion to Buddhism and why Nagasena believes a monk should be like a braying ass.

Ad break-out: Now let’s get back to our conversation with Maria Heim.

James Shaheen: So as the debate finally begins, Milinda asks Nagasena for his name, and Nagasena responds with a short treatise on no-self, as he says, and this is a quote, “It is a mere name, and no person is found here.” So can you tell us about Nagasena’s arguments for no-self?

Maria Heim: Yeah, so he wants to establish very clearly, in the very first question he’s asked, “What is your name?” he wants to establish something about language, that language is the terms that we give for things in the world, for people, for objects is conventional. It’s pragmatic. It doesn’t refer to ultimate essences or ultimate substances or ultimate realities. And that is, of course, a very important teaching in the Theravada tradition and in Buddhism more generally, this pragmatic use of language. And then, as we’ve talked about, it goes immediately to the chariot. Well, first of all, Milinda really responds very vehemently to this. He says, “Well, if Nagasena is just a conventional label and there’s no person here,” by which he means no ultimate self, “then how do we make sense of you over time? How do we make sense of moral culpability? How do we even talk about who Nagasena might be if it’s just this kind of label?” And so then Nagasena goes immediately to the chariot metaphor, and he does it in this kind of gentle way where he says, “Well, you know, you’re a delicate king and surely didn’t walk to our discussion today on the hot gravel. You must have taken a chariot.” And then we begin to consider the chariot. The way that Nagasena takes him through that is by asking, you know, what is this word chariot? Do we apply it to the wheels, to the axle, to the frame? He goes through all the different parts of the chariot, and in each case Milinda says, no, we don’t mean chariot when we just talk about its parts, and then the parts separately don’t amount to a chariot. And then he comes to see that the word “chariot” is just a name we give conventionally for a certain kind of a certain arrangement or a certain collection of parts and that it’s a purely sort of pragmatic term. And at that point, Nagasena says, well, it’s the same with me, that a human being is the collection of changing parts that we conventionally give a notion of person to but that doesn’t refer to some kind of unchanging essential reality behind all of that.

James Shaheen: So after the chariot analogy, Milinda continues to ask for more analogies—which the reader’s obviously going to welcome, they’re so lovely—or opamma. Can you tell us about the form of the opamma? What is an opamma, and what philosophical work does it perform?

Maria Heim: Yeah, good. So an opamma is, and I had to make a decision whether to translate it as a simile or as a metaphor. Sometimes it’s a metaphor, more often, a simile. I wound up choosing analogy to kind of get at some of the kind of more philosophical work. Simile, I think, sounded more literary, even though in some places that is what’s going on with some of these metaphors. But in this early part of the text, I think it’s really doing philosophical work to help us understand things that are a little bit hard to talk about when we’re thinking about psychology and what comprises a human being’s experience.

And so this first chapter where the chariot metaphor is going on, there’s other metaphors, and I think that I find myself in my own teaching often referring to these metaphors when students ask a hard question. For example, a question that we always get teaching Buddhism is that, well, if there’s no self, if there’s no enduring person, what is it that gets reborn? And of course, Milinda asks that. And what stays the same across multiple lifetimes? And so that the way he handles that is he says, well, a person is a name we give to a certain amount of continuity, but that continuity is neither the same nor different within a single lifetime or across multiple lifetimes. And then he gives some analogies of just like milk turns to butter and turns to ghee, it’s not the same or different, but there is some continuity between them, or just like a flame on a lamp over a night, it’s neither the same nor different over time. And so we begin to say, OK, I’ve now got a way that I can picture or imagine how continuity can work without identity and think about a person in those terms, and so you see some of the philosophical work that I think he’s pressing these analogies to do.

James Shaheen: So you quote the philosopher Iris Murdoch. I once went on a Iris Murdoch kick and read everything she wrote, so I have to ask. She wrote that metaphors are not merely peripheral decorations or even useful models but fundamental forms of our awareness of our condition. Can you say more about this?

Maria Heim: Yeah, I love Iris Murdoch. It’s just fantastic. And so that’s a quotation that I put in there because I do think she’s good on this in terms of helping us see that metaphor is philosophically serious. And so this would be from her book, The Sovereignty of Good. And she herself, you know, she has this rather famous example of the mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law and how the mother-in-law is, you know, so she’s trying to think about moral agency and what that means and wanting to interrupt the philosophical context she was in with trying to understand to what degree is an internal struggle of changing one’s mind to be more generous and more loving that may not actually change one’s external behavior, which could be perfectly fine all the way through, but how much does an internal struggle like that count morally? And so she’s got this wonderful example of a mother-in-law who slowly has to work on her narrow prejudices against her daughter-in-law and become a more just and loving person even while her outside behavior has always been perfectly impeccable. She’s a proper English mother-in-law and all of that, but inside she’s somewhat narrow and ungenerous and so she changes that. So Iris Murdoch herself, I think her book illustrates how an example, an ordinary example, an example from ordinary life, is often how we need to understand some of the most important ethical or philosophical questions that we face. And so I put that in there just because I wanted these analogies to be taken seriously philosophically. But I also think that the kinds of Abhidhamma categories, so that the first chapter, really, after the narrative, that first chapter of the chariot is really a kind of an Abhidhamma chapter where we’re getting definitions of key Abhidhamma terminology, which is quite technical, as I think some of your listeners will know. But they’re hard terms to get at, and because of the very nature of this as being a discussion between a layman and a monk and being public in this way, Nagasena can’t just rely on some technical, stuffy Abhidhamma definitions. He’s got to rely on analogies. And so the analogies are all very captivating and help us actually understand these mental processes in a way that’s pretty compelling. So that’s what I wanted to kind of get at with the Murdoch quote.

James Shaheen: Yeah, I’m going to come back to the analogies in a second. Just for those who may not know, could you briefly tell us what the Abhidhamma is, especially since that’s what Nagasena learned first?

Maria Heim: Yeah. So the Abhidhamma is one of the three baskets of the Pali canonical scriptures, and it has its origins in the suttas where people like Sariputta, primarily, but others as well would be engaged in meditation and would be examining their first person experience closely for its contents, and they would start to list some of the phenomena that they were observing with some precision, being able to kind of sift out what one is experiencing and find the right language for it. And so the Abhidhamma is seven books in the Pali tradition of that kind of close observation of experience and very, very long lists of the type of phenomena, what one can come to observe if one is paying very close attention to one’s experience.

In fact, there’s a very beautiful simile in the Milinda text about what the Abhidhamma is where he says that the Buddha did something very difficult when he created the Abhidhamma, and it is like a person at sea who scoops up a ladle full of sea water and has an unusually refined palate so he can taste that sea water and discern which drop came from which river—this droplet came from the Ganges, this droplet came from the Yamana River, and so on—and so like that, the Buddha was able to take up a moment of experience, a brief time unit of experience, and discern, separate and discern each of its components, each of its phenomena. And so the Abhidhamma will come up with lists of, like, fifty-sic things that can happen in a particular type of thought, and all of these are very fine-grained, little aspects of phenomena, of experience, and so the point of all of that is to learn to engage in this kind of deep introspection that disaggregates our experience to understand the different workings of these phenomena in order to try to root out the bad ones, the unhealthy pathologies, and to cultivate the positive states. So it’s an extraordinary philosophical endeavor, very, very intricate, very interesting in all kinds of ways in terms of the kind of psychology that it offers us, so different in many respects than contemporary psychological models that we have out in the world today, but very, very sophisticated and very, very interesting to try to track what it’s doing.

James Shaheen: Yeah, we keep coming back to analogies, and that’s a wonderful analogy for the Abhidhamma, the sea water, and many of the analogies use the languages and images of everyday life, especially the world of the marketplace—analogies to farmers, potters, carpenters, chickens. Can you tell us more about Nagasena’s choice of analogies?

Maria Heim: Yeah, so Nagasena’s very much got his feet on the ground. He’s very reaching for things that anybody would understand. Often he’s reaching for things that a king in particular would understand. He’ll give Milinda an analogy of something that’s obviously a concern for a king, and often Milinda will ask for that. He’ll say, “Well, bring this back to my domain as a king. How should I think about punishment?” or something like that. They’re often very much aware of the royal context that they’re in. But there’s a lot of everyday stuff. So, for example, in this first chapter, the kind of abhidhamma chapter, Nagasena is trying to define attention and understanding, or pañña, or wisdom. And he says, “Well, King Milinda, have you ever seen barley reapers do their work?” And Milinda says, “Yeah, I know about them,” and so he says, “Well, attention is like when they grab a bunch of barley with one hand. Attention of the mind is grabbing onto something. And then understanding is like when they slice through the barley. Understanding is slicing through and penetrating something.” And then he said, “But there’s another way to understand understanding as well. Understanding is also like when a light comes on in a dark room and everything is visible,” so these really down-to-earth, very real ways that we can understand what are actually quite technical terms about mental operations in the Abhidhamma.

James Shaheen: Yeah, it’s interesting, listening to it, we can’t really even think or understand without similes, metaphors, analogies. I mean, they’re so fundamental to our perception of the world. But after the first portion of the debate is concluded, King Milinda decides to live as an ascetic for seven days and decides he will “not consider matters of state, nor give rise to thoughts of passion, thoughts of hatred, or thoughts of delusion,” and while the first portion of their conversation took place in the King’s palace, for the next section, he asks Nagasena to come with him into the forest so that they can discuss more secret matters. So can you tell us about the significance of the shift of location?

Maria Heim: Yeah, I’m glad you spotted that. So there’s actually several stages of their conversation. So first it’s this big public arena, but that ends pretty quickly. And then Milinda invites a smaller number of monks to come into his inner quarters and start talking, and so some of the conversation takes place there. And then this stage of the text is where, yes, Milinda has become very earnest and he goes into the woods and he lives for a week in a kind of ascetic way, and then he approaches Nagasena and says, “There are some questions that are best discussed in secret.” And so that seems to be a kind of traditional Indian idea, I think, that when we really want to get down to deepest philosophical reflection, we need to get away from the trappings of the court and away from the trappings of human society and go into the forest together to really get at some of the deeper questions. And so other people at this point have fallen away, and this is presented as a sort of secret thing, although it’s not. None of the discussion winds up being particularly esoteric. But nevertheless, it’s a kind of buildup to the development of their relationship. This is no longer about a performance for other people. IIt’s really two men going into the forest together to really engage in an earnest search for truth together. And so that, I think, is quite a beautiful little moment of the text.

James Shaheen: Right. You point that out. You say that they start out in this very formal and public debate, and they end up in this very intimate search together for the truth. But in this portion of the conversation, Milinda poses what he calls the ram horn dilemmas, or seeming contradictions or conflicts in the Buddha’s statements. So can you tell us about the ram horn dilemmas?

Maria Heim: Yeah. So the ram horn dilemmas really constitute the largest portion of the text, so that’s a very large, chapter three and chapter five, I think, are these dilemmas and really philosophical discourse based on dilemmas. The term “ram horn dilemmas,” we don’t fully know where that came from, but some of the recent scholarship on this suggests that this was an idea in the Greek materials, that you can be caught between two prongs of horns of a debate. We still have that language a little bit. And that’s certainly how these questions are laid out, that on the one hand, it’s usually a question about the Buddhist texts, and it seems that Milinda’s very well read in Buddhist sources. So he’ll say, “On one hand, we have the Buddha say this in this section, and that seems to collide with something the Buddha said over on this point. And so how do you resolve the inconsistency?” Sometimes these dilemmas are quite involved and involve multiple similes and multiple discussions in order to get to resolve them.

So sometimes they concern something that we might call a certain kind of scriptural hermeneutics, like how do you deal with texts’ apparent contradictions in the Buddhist teachings that are confusing? Other times these dilemmas seem to be a kind of ethical dilemma. Milinda might be asking about, well, how do I make sense of on the one hand the need for a king to engage in punishment and, on the other hand, the Buddha’s teachings about nonviolence? And so how do I think about this in terms of statecraft and my own role? Or there might be a question about another kind of ethical dilemma that they really get into, the questions of King Vessantara, which is an important jataka story, particularly for the Theravada tradition where our bodhisattva, our Buddha in a previous life, gave away his children in order to perfect the perfection of generosity. And it’s a heart-wrenching tale in the jataka stories, and it’s laid out here in a very heart-wrenching way. And Milinda’s really pushing hard on this as a dilemma, as a moral dilemma: How could our bodhisattva have done something so cruel as give away his little children in order to achieve awakening?

So this dilemma-based kind of discussion, I think, is some of the most important in the text, where really tricky questions of understanding the Buddha’s teaching are coming to the fore, but also moral and religious questions are coming up that show that Milinda’s really thinking hard about possible problems with Buddha’s teachings, and Nagasena is put to work to try to solve some of these conundrums, sometimes more effectively than other times, but always pretty creatively.

James Shaheen: Yeah, Vessantara is a tough one. Can you say how Nagasena understands and employs the story of Vessantara’s renunciation?

Maria Heim: Yeah, so the story and the way that, again, this would be a literary element, I think, in our text, but the story is a great classical, beautiful literary story in the Pali jataka collection. It’s very long. It’s the longest jataka, and it dwells on the pain of these little children being dragged off, Vessantara’s children being dragged off by a greedy Brahman, and Vessantara’s gift of them is necessary for his perfection of generosity. You have to be prepared to give everything, but it’s very painful. And the way the story is told in the jataka stories really invites critique. It invites emotion. It invites challenge, really wrestling with this question, and the Milinda text picks this up, and he said Vessantara did what is the hardest thing to do, that when his little children were being dragged off, he didn’t go running after them and grabbing them and saving them. And it really bears down on the reader that how could this have been OK? And Nagasena says—well, you know, I’m not sure Nagasena is all that persuasive, to be honest. He says, if Vessantara hadn’t done that, if he hadn’t done what was so difficult to do, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation today, so he did something that has inspired debate and conversation ever since, and he did something that ultimately made it possible for him to become the Buddha and to save all beings and to do all the things that he did and that we almost just sort of have to accept this. And of course, the way that each one of these ram horn dilemmas ends is that Milinda is persuaded. But this particular discussion goes on many pages, and in the end, Milinda is persuaded, but I’m not sure that every reader will be.

James Shaheen: Well, I mean, the same question comes up about how could the Buddha leave his wife and child, so these questions about renunciation are tough ones to answer.

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James Shaheen: Another philosophical style that Nagasena uses is inference. For instance, Nagasena is asked how he knows that the Buddha existed if he himself has never seen him. So can you tell us about how Nagasena is able to prove the Buddha’s existence through inference?

Maria Heim: Yeah. Good. So, just before I jump into that particular part of the text, I just want to say something. In researching the text, I came across this piece by Andrew Schumann, who is arguing that some of the earliest Indian logic is really getting started in the Milindapanha, at least in terms of the records that we have for it. So that the Indian systems and the Nyaya tradition, which wouldn’t have been on the ground as yet as a school at this early period but subsequently kind of develops into a school, is very interested in the means of knowledge that we have and in how logical reasoning should go, and it develops that we would have knowledge, means of knowledge from perception, from inference, from analogy. And so we’ve already seen that this text is interested in perception, inference, and analogy, even though these aren’t being formalized in the way that they will be in subsequent Indian philosophical tradition, analogy being a kind of source of knowledge in the ways we’ve already talked about. But then we also have this really important idea of inference, and there’s a place in which Milinda says, “Persuade me not just with praise but with inference and with analogies.” And so then we get this question, and there’s lots of times in the course of the text where Milinda is quite like, “I’m not even sure nirvana is real. I’m not even sure the Buddha ever existed.” And so he is really challenging some basic assumptions of Nagasena. And at this point he says, “Can you persuade me that the Buddha was real? How do you know? Did you ever meet him? Did your father ever meet him?” And Nagasena says, “No. None of us ever met him. And so then he launches into, this is an entire chapter in which he launches into what the chapter’s called, “A Question Resolved by Inference.” And he invites Milinda to consider a well-designed city and that because the city, if you have a city that’s very well laid out, very well designed, very orderly in its streets and its bazaars and its construction, you can infer that there was at one time a great city architect who designed it, even if that city architect has since left and gone to another land. And similarly, because we have the dharma, we have the teaching, which is beautifully designed, beautifully laid out, we can infer the Buddha existed because he’s the one who designed and taught the dharma. So there we have the inference, but then it’s also got an analogy in it so that now we have this whole structure of the dharma is like a city, and so he begins to talk about dharma city. And so by understanding the moats and the city fortifications and the streets and the bazaars of dharma city, on the analogy of the features of a city, we can come to understand the structures in a systematic way, the structures and the features of the dharma. So he really runs then with the simile to help us understand the whole kind of very consistent and, in his view, very beautiful edifice that is the Buddha’s teaching.

James Shaheen: You know, some of my favorite parts of the Milindapanha are the extensive lists it contains, including the list of all the qualities a monk must possess to become an arhat like attributes of a braying ass, the vines of a gored plant, a termite, a river, and a one-eyed man. In fact, Nagasena spends about a hundred pages explaining these attributes. So can you tell us about the final chapter of the Milindapanha? What can we learn from these analogies?

Maria Heim: Yeah. Again, this seems to be a part of the text that got sort of tacked on at some point. It’s just so out of spirit with the rest of the text, largely to explore, I think, these analogies and to go through a kind of, as we talked about earlier, literary training of vision and appreciation of what the monastic life, what the life of a renunciant or what he calls a yogi, actually what that would look like by seeing the ways that a braying ass, some of them are a little surprising, are sort of reflected, at least there’s some feature that could be understood to be, I can’t remember what that one is, but some feature which could be understood to be a kind of quality that the yogi or the practitioner would want to cultivate.

What is a little odd about that chapter though is that it starts off with a list of all these things it’s going to talk about. The actual text breaks. Even after about a hundred pages, it breaks off, and it’s not complete in terms of all of the things that it’s promising to talk about, and it just sort of stops midway, and then the overarching story gets wrapped up at this point. Then we go back, you know, Milinda is ready to renounce the world, he donates a big monastery, and then he renounces the world and becomes a monk and hands over the affairs of state to his sons and eventually becomes an arhat. And the text just ends. So, I don’t know if we’re missing some manuscripts there or exactly what happened with that last chapter, but it definitely felt like something of a different text.

James Shaheen: Yeah, it feels like a different text, but as you say, the text itself is a compilation. It’s in Pali, and that was not the language of the region.

Maria Heim: Yeah.

James Shaheen: Do you have any favorite analogies from the text? There are so many.

Maria Heim: I know, that’s a good question. I don’t know. I mean, yeah, we’ve already talked about the Vessantara section. There aren’t a lot of analogies in that one, but I think that’s one of my favorite parts of the text because I like how both beautiful it is and how challenging it is and how it doesn’t quite get resolved.

Oh, I know one thing that I really like. One of the things that’s happening in the narrative between Milinda and Nagasena over the course of the entire text—now, your reader should know that my translation’s like a thousand pages, and that’s because this particular series has the facing Pali on each page, so that the translation’s only about half of that, but it’s a very long text. So it’s a lot going on in it, but over the arc of the whole narrative story between Milinda and Nagasena, there are different points in which their relationship is evolving, as we’ve already talked about. And there’s one place where early in their conversation, after some further discussion, they wrap it up for the night, and Nagasena goes back to his chambers and sleeps, and Milinda goes back to his, and then the next morning they meet again, and Milinda starts off the conversation, and he says, “You know, Nagasena, I don’t want you to think that I went home and slept easily. I went home and spent the night mulling over our discussion and worrying if my questions were good.” And then he says, “But I concluded by the end of the night that all of my questions were well asked, and all of your answers were well answered.” And Nagasena rushes right in and he says, “You know, I don’t want you to think that I went home and slept well. I, too, spent the night mulling over the discussion, and I, too, concluded that all of your questions were good and all of my answers were apt.” And so at this point, they both celebrate each other, and so their relationship now, they really, genuinely trust each other. So that’s a very beautiful little moment in the text.

And then there’s another moment later on where Milinda is clearly starting to really be a converted Buddhist, and at some point he almost wants to renounce the world and become a monk, but then he says, “I can’t do so because I have many enemies. I am like a lion in a golden cage sitting there facing, looking out.” So this idea that kingship, because you’ve got all kinds of cares and all kinds of commitments and all kinds of problems that you’re facing, you’re like a lion in a golden cage. We’re getting over the course of the whole story a kind of deepening of the relationship and a kind of evolving that Milinda’s going through. So that’s another part of the text that I really like.

James Shaheen: Yeah, sometimes it takes such a human turn. Who can’t relate to “How’d I do,” lying in bed wondering, “Did I do OK?” And they come back and they say, “Well, you did great.” So after Milinda’s 304 questions have been answered, we learn that the earth quakes, the gods rain down a shower of celestial flowers, and Milinda takes refuge in the three jewels and eventually does renounce his kingdom and attain arhatship. So what can we learn from Milinda’s conversion?

Maria Heim: Well, I don’t know what we can learn from it. I do love the fact that you quoted that at certain junctures in the text, the earth quakes, the earth roars, the gods cheer, even Brahmans cheer. Things happen with a certain kind of dramatic cosmic force. I mean, it’s a Buddhist story; at the end of the day, of course he’s going to convert. At the end of the day, of course he’s all in on this. So that is almost, as far as I can tell, a pretty foregone conclusion. But it’s both sometimes dramatic and sometimes subtle. So for example, the first part of the discussion, in the early chapters Nagasena always refers to the Buddha as the Bhagavan, which indicates a degree of commitment, “the Lord.” But Milinda, in those early chapters, refers to the Buddha as the Buddha, which is perfectly fine, but it doesn’t indicate a kind of degree of commitment. But at a certain point in the text, Milinda starts referring to the Buddha as the Bhagavan. It’s not signaled in the text in any way. I just noticed it when I was translating. So for all the dramatic moments of the text, there’s also something kind of gradual that’s happening and shifting and deepening of his perspective and his awareness of what’s important and a kind of softening of their relationship and a change in sensibility that Milinda is undergoing. That’s also been fun to track.

James Shaheen: You know, I wasn’t going to ask this question because I didn’t think I had time, but I just have to ask it. You do bring up the issue of whether this is a Greek influence on the Buddhist world or a Buddhist influence on the Greek world. Which way do you lean?

Maria Heim: Well, it’s not clear that the text had much influence in either world in the sense of even if we take it to—I take it to be largely an Indian text that is using Indian kind of forms and ideas by and large. But it’s not clear that it brought Greek influence into India, nor is it clear that the Greeks picked up this text and learned about Indian thought through it. So it doesn’t seem to have influenced either civilization with the other. So the question that scholars have taken up is this mostly a Greek text in terms of its concerns and its style and its genre, or is it more of an Indian text with genres of Indian knowledge that we know about? And it’s a little bit different than both. But my reading of the scholarship, and my own way of seeing it, is it feels very deeply Indian to me, despite there being things about it that are not things we find elsewhere in Buddhist text. It doesn’t feel like a Greek text. It feels like an Indian text.

James Shaheen: Yeah, it’s amazing that almost all of the difficult concepts in Buddhism that are explained with analogy, at least in the Theravada world, can be found in this text. It almost works like an introduction to Theravada Buddhism.

Maria Heim: Yeah, and it was definitely taken to be such. So Buddhaghosa, for example, this 5th-century commentator, leans very heavily into the Milindapanha. So he’s using it as a really useful textbook on Buddhism. And of course today people find it a very useful textbook on Buddhism, a very accessible kind of thing. I think what works so well for lots of people is that Milinda is not an in-house audience. He is not already persuaded, and yet he knows, at least the way the text is presented, he knows Buddhist texts really well. So it’s, as you say, it’s quoting Pali Buddhist sources all the time and deeply immersed in the tradition, but he’s coming at it without embracing its assumptions. And so, is nirvana even real, right? What do you mean there’s no self? How could we possibly talk about rebirth if you don’t have a self? You know, he’s coming at it with these really hard questions. And so it works very well as a kind of textbook or an initiation into Buddhism, and it seems to have done so in the ancient world as well.

James Shaheen: Well, Maria, it’s been a great pleasure. I’m sorry we’re out of time. Thanks so much for joining.  For our listeners, be sure to pick up a copy of The Questions of Milinda, available now. Thanks, Maria.

Maria Heim: Thank you, James.

James Shaheen:  ​​You’ve been listening to Tricycle Talks with Maria Heim. Tricycle is a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to making Buddhist teachings and practices broadly available. We are pleased to offer our podcasts freely. If you would like to support the podcast, please consider subscribing to Tricycle or making a donation at tricycle.org/donate. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks is produced by Sarah Fleming and the Podglomerate. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!