The Greeks in Bactria and India c12.10

c12.10

Kings who liked disputations were a commonplace in Indian tradition, as were philosophical discussions in Indian life; some sage, arriving at a village, would challenge all and sundry to dispute with him, the conclusion being that the vanquished became the disciple of the victor,³ as at the end of Part II Milinda becomes the disciple of Nāgasena. Also, with the Dialogues of the Buddha, the dialogue had become in India a well-established literary form for the conveyance of instruction in religion or philosophy. What was not known in Indian literature—what had never happened before and was not to happen again—was that the interlocutor in a dialogue should be a foreign king and that the aim of the interlocutor should be a dialectical victory; for the interlocutors in the Dialogues of the Buddha, like those in the Dialogues of Plato, are only an agreeable piece of machinery for eliciting the opinions of Buddha or Socrates. The model of the Milindapañha has often been sought in one of the Dialogues of the Buddha, the Sāmaññaphala Sutta;⁴ but though it is pretty certain that one section of the introduction to the Milinda echoes the introduction to the older dialogue,⁵ the scheme of the two works is totally different. In the Sāmaññaphala Sutta the king Ajātasattu, who really wants to know, asks one reasoned question, naming various learned men (some of them known to be historical) who have been unable to give him the answer, and the Buddha then makes a long reply; there is no working out of the argument by question and answer. But though Indian scholars may be reminded of the Sāmaññaphala Sutta or the Upanishads, any Greek scholar who looks into the Milinda will at once be reminded of something very different, a Hellenistic work in which the writer makes a foreign king put a large number of questions to the wise men of the writer's own race and creed, the whole work being designed to do for the religion of the Jewish writer what Part I of the Milinda was designed to do for the religion of its Buddhist author: the Letter of Pseudo-Aristeas. I shall come to this work presently; I hope that it may help to resolve one or two of the problems which the Milinda presents to the Greek scholar.