A History of Indian Literature v2.c19.s5.2

v2.c19.s5.2

Apart from later additions, the greater part of the Pāli texts of the canon arose in India, and it was not until later that they were transmitted to Ceylon. The great bulk of the non-canonical Pāli literature, is, however, the work of the monks of Ceylon. The most notable exception is the Milindapañha,²⁾ "the Questions of Milinda." This work must have originated in north-west India, the only region where the memory of the great and wise ruler Milinda could have been sufficiently vivid as to warrant his being made the hero of a poem. This Milinda is none other than the Greek king Menandros, the most prominent of the rulers of the Græco-Indian empire, which, in the second century B.C., had separated itself from the Græco-Bactrian empire. The period of his reign was probably the first century B.C.,³⁾ and he ruled over a great empire, which comprised not only the whole of the region of the Indus as well as Gujrat, but the Ganges province too. It may have been an historical event, the meeting and conversation of the Greek king with a celebrated Buddhist teacher, which led to the origin of the Milindapañha, or it may have been that the author of the dialogue merely took a pattern from so many dialogues in the Upaniṣads and Itihāsas, in introducing the great king in conversation with a sage: at all events, even if he was not himself a Buddhist,¹ Milinda-Menandros must have been closely connected with the Buddhist community. We can also assume as a certainty that the author of the Milindapañha, whose name, it is true, we do not know, lived at a time when the memory of the Greek king was still green. But as the Greek rule in India came to an end soon after the death of Menandros, it is scarcely feasible that his memory should have endured longer than a century at the most. Hence the work is more likely to have been written in the first century A.D., rather than in the second. The fact that the problems discussed in the Milindapañha are, in the main, identical with those forming the favourite themes in the canon, would also seem to indicate a comparatively early date.² Buddhaghosa, too, the famous commentator of the fifth century, refers to the Milindapañha as an unimpeachable authority, on a level with the canonical texts.¹ In style, however, the Milindapañha shows an advance on the speeches of the Suttapiṭaka; and it is but few of the dialogues of the canon, as for instance that of the Pāyāsi-Sutta in the Dīghanikāya, which are as vivid and sprightly as those of the Milindapañha. These last-named are well able to bear comparison with the Dialogues of Plato.²