Revisiting ‘The Questions of Milinda’

The Questions of Milinda is one of the most renowned texts within Theravada Buddhism—and one of the most translated Buddhist texts around the world. The text follows a transformational philosophical dialogue between the Indo-Greek king Milinda and a Buddhist monk named Nagasena as they discuss the nature of the self, the meaning of renunciation, and the sources of knowledge. In her new translation of The Questions of Milinda, scholar Maria Heim devotes particular attention to the literary and aesthetic qualities of the text, presenting it as a literary classic as well as a philosophical one.

In a recent episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sat down with Heim to discuss the literary and aesthetic qualities of The Questions of Milinda, how treating Buddhist texts as literature can deepen our perception, what we can learn from the text’s famous chariot analogy, and the philosophical work that metaphors and analogies can perform.

You say that in addition to its philosophical value, the book is 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? 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 until I was translating how delightful the story is of the engagement between Nagasena and Milinda. It starts with what’s called a bahirakatha, the backstory of how they met in a previous life, and there’s great dramatic buildup to this dialogue, and there are 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.

Another area where there’s some real literary quality to the text is how deeply analogical the discussion is, and this is doing philosophical work but also literary work. Almost every question that Milinda asks Nagasena is met with an analogy or a simile. The chariot’s a good example. Nagasena doesn’t answer Milinda’s question directly but says, “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 and Buddhist philosophical ideas, and they’re often quite well elaborated so that we develop a whole visual image that makes the ideas that Nagasena is talking about accessible but often quite beautiful as well. As you say, in the way that the text 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 do the best I could to render [that beauty] into English. For me, it was just fabulous to be able to do so because I’m interested in both philosophy and literature, and this text brings the two together in a really delightful way.

You say that treating the text as literature can help us deepen our perception. How so? Yeah, the analogies are often quite meticulous, and they draw our eye to something in particular that Nagasena will take us through. In that sense, I think it enriches and enhances our perception and what we allow ourselves to notice. That, of course, is a deeply Buddhist idea: How do we come to see the world more clearly or attend to the right kinds of things in the world? 

[We see this in] the very last chapter of the text. It’s pretty clear that the Pali text that we have is a composite and that there were layers added to it over time. Some of the chapters are quite different from other chapters, and the very last chapter is a bit disappointing because it reads 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, the whole chapter is analogies, where Nagasena is giving Milinda these various similes about how the aspiring arhat should be like the lotus in a certain respect, or have some of the qualities of an elephant in certain respects. Then it will elaborate: Just like the lotus rises up out of the muck and is 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. Just 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 see literature as training our vision to find beauty and to notice the world more deeply, and the text is trying to do that throughout.

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?  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. This is a classic Buddhist narrative that everything that happens now has a backstory. And it’s a funny little story—I was deeply charmed by its gentle humor. 

In this story, the novice monk is not doing his chores, and he gets scolded by the senior monk and is 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 as 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, saying “May I, in birth after birth, be able to answer any kind of question that is ever asked by this guy.”

I see literature as training our vision to find beauty and to notice the world more deeply, and the text is trying to do that throughout.

Lifetimes pass, and the senior monk becomes Nagasena, 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. In this lifetime, King Milinda is a powerful and respected king in this region, and he engages in a classic trope in Indian literature of the king who wants to debate philosophers. Milinda 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.”

Whenever Milinda gets in one of these moods, the monks slink away to the Himalayas because they don’t have someone who can handle his questions. The monks are getting quite worried about this, so they go to 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, “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, and they say, “Will you please be reborn as a human in order to help us fend off this king?” Mahasena says, “Thank you very much, but the human world is really problematic, and I want nothing to do with it.” Essentially, “Thanks, but no thanks.” And so they beseech him, “Please, we really need to do something,” and so Mahasena says, “Well, just maybe, I might be able to take on this king.” Then Mahasena gets reborn into a Brahman family as an infant named Nagasena. There’s 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 built up a great deal of dramatic power. The debate arena is a very public affair, and King Milinda is flanked by his 500 Yonakas, or Indo-Greek Ionians, and Nagasena is flanked by 80,000 monks in his retinue. At this point, though, King Milinda is starting to get quite nervous. And so that very first chapter ends with Milinda sweating it out, 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 and charming, and I think it’s an important part of the text.

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 terms of the debate? Yeah, that’s a lovely moment, and a lovely moment actually for our time as well. Nagasena insists that scholars need to debate on a civil and open ground, whereas when kings debate, if kings don’t like an answer, they can shout, “Off with his head,” and so Nagasena 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.” That, I think, is an important moment in the text, and it does establish the nature of this as a genuinely open discourse. 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, and he 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.” He won’t let up until he is satisfied in the case of each 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.

As the debate finally begins, Milinda asks Nagasena for his name, and Nagasena responds with a short treatise on no-self, as he says, “It is a mere name, and no person is found here.” So can you tell us about Nagasena’s arguments for no-self? Yeah, in the very first question he’s asked, Nagasena wants to establish something about language: that language, or the terms that we use for things in the world, 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.

Milinda responds very vehemently to this. He says, “Well, if Nagasena is just a conventional label and there’s no person here, 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 a label?” And so then Nagasena goes immediately to the chariot metaphor, and he does it in a gentle way where he says, “Well, 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 he begins to consider the chariot. The way that Nagasena takes him through that is by asking, 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. He comes to see that the word “chariot” is just a name we give conventionally for a certain kind arrangement or collection of parts and that it’s a purely pragmatic term. At that point, Nagasena says, “Well, it’s the same with me,” that a human being is the collection of changing parts to which we conventionally give a notion of person but that doesn’t refer to some kind of unchanging essential reality behind all of that.

After the chariot analogy, Milinda continues to ask for more analogies, or opamma. Can you tell us about the form of the opamma? What is an opamma, and what philosophical work does it perform?  I had to make a decision about how to translate opamma. Sometimes it’s translated as simile or metaphor, but I wound up choosing analogy to get at the more philosophical work it’s doing. In this early part of the text, I think the opamma is really doing philosophical work to help us understand things that are hard to talk about when we’re thinking about psychology and what comprises a human being’s experience. In this first chapter with the chariot metaphor, there are other metaphors, and in my own teaching I often find myself referring to these metaphors when students ask a hard question.

For example, a question that we often get when teaching Buddhism is, If there’s no self, if there’s no enduring person, what is it that gets reborn? What stays the same across multiple lifetimes? And of course, Milinda asks that. The way that Nagasena handles this question is that he says that 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: 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 he’s pressing these analogies to do.

You quote the philosopher Iris Murdoch, and 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? I love Iris Murdoch. She’s just fantastic. I included that quotation because I think her work helps us see that metaphor is philosophically serious. This is from her book, The Sovereignty of Good, where she’s trying to think about moral agency and wanting to interrupt the philosophical context she was in. Specifically, she was trying to understand to what degree an internal struggle that doesn’t actually change one’s external behavior counts morally. She has 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. Outside, she’s a proper English mother-in-law, but inside she’s somewhat narrow and ungenerous, and so she changes that. I think Murdoch’s book illustrates how 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 the introduction because I wanted these analogies to be taken seriously philosophically.

The chapter with the chariot analogy is really an abhidhamma chapter, where we’re getting definitions of key abhidhamma terminology, which is quite technical. They’re hard terms to get at, and because of the very nature of this being a public discussion between a layman and a monk, Nagasena can’t just rely on technical 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.

Yeah, it’s amazing that almost all of the difficult concepts in Buddhism that are explained with analogies, at least in the Theravada world, can be found in this text. It almost works like an introduction to Theravada Buddhism. Yeah, and it was definitely taken to be such. For example, Buddhaghosa, a 5th-century commentator, leans very heavily into the Milindapanha and uses it as a really useful textbook on Buddhism. Of course, people today find it a very useful textbook on Buddhism as well. 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 Buddhist texts really well. He’s quoting Pali Buddhist sources all the time and deeply immersed in the tradition, but he’s coming at it without embracing its assumptions. He’s coming at it with these really hard questions, like Is nirvana even real? What do you mean there’s no self? How could we possibly talk about rebirth if you don’t have a self? And so it works very well as a kind of textbook or initiation into Buddhism, and it seems to have done so in the ancient world as well.

This excerpt has been edited for length and clarity.