The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s7.153

c10.s7.153

There is a bare possibility that another Indian writer may have been influenced, not by any particular Greek writing, but by the knowledge that there existed a certain Greek literary type, and that is the author of Part II of the Milindapañha, who drew a picture of an ideal Buddhist city, the city of all wise and faithful men.¹ It has been called the only Utopia known in Indian literature,² and it has been suggested that the author may have read Plato.³ There is no need to go to Plato, for the fourth and third centuries abounded in Greek Utopias, but the Indian Ideal City is not in the least like any Greek Utopia which has survived; it is more like the New Jerusalem, and its bazaars sell Buddhist virtues. The most that could be suggested that the author had heard that Greeks wrote Utopias, and even that is somewhat discounted by his citing a lost Indian work as his model.⁴ And in fact there is said to be another description in Buddhist literature which has also been compared to the New Jerusalem of Revelation and which cannot be far in time from Part II of the Milindapañha: that is the paradise of Amitābha, the Buddha of measureless light, one of the antecedent Buddhas of the Mahāyāna, where men live in unbroken happiness till they attain Nirvana.⁵