The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s4.285

c10.s4.285

Though India, having no national consciousness, took little enough notice of her numerous foreign invaders, Menander’s name, unlike Alexander’s, somehow managed to survive, for the Kashmiri poet Ksemendra in the eleventh century A.D. has a story about him which (it has ingeniously been suggested) is a transfer to him of a story first told about the great Kanishka two centuries after his death.⁶ It is interesting too that an Indo-Chinese tradition, possibly old, connects with Menander the origin of the most famous statue of Buddha in Indo-China, the statue of Buddha of the Emerald, which Menander’s teacher Nāgasena made out of a magic emerald by supernatural power.¹ But the greatest testimony to Menander’s legendary fame is the mere existence of the Milindapañha; the two unknown authors of the two parts of this work had a large choice of Buddhist monarchs whom they could have made protagonists in a Buddhist dialogue, but instead of selecting Asoka or some other Indian king as interlocutor both chose the Yavana Menander. And this brings me to the final question, the question of Menander’s real attitude to the Buddhist religion, as opposed to the legendary figure in the Milinda of a great Buddhist monarch.