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Reading group: Nāgasena’s chariot and flame in the Questions of King Milinda

Ayya Kusalañāṇī Fellow
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Personal identityBuddhistIndianAbhidharmaNagasenaThe Buddha#anatta#chariot#milindapanha#rebirth
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The Milindapañha, the Questions of King Milinda, is a dialogue between a king usually identified with the Indo-Greek ruler Menander and a monk called Nāgasena. It is a composite text that grew over centuries, so I read Nāgasena as a literary interlocutor rather than a biography. Its arguments about the self are among the clearest early statements of the no-self teaching in action, and I would like to read the core passages with whoever is interested.

Translations. T. W. Rhys Davids's older version, The Questions of King Milinda, is free online. I. B. Horner's Milinda's Questions for the Pali Text Society is more exact. Either will do; say which you are using.

Plan

  • Week 1. The opening exchange. Nāgasena says his name is only a designation; the king asks whether Nāgasena is the hair, the nails, the feelings, and so on; then the chariot.
  • Week 2. The lamp burning through the night and the milk that becomes curds, butter and ghee: continuity that is neither simply the same nor simply different.
  • Week 3. The passages on rebirth and responsibility, including the man who steals mangoes and argues that the fruit he took were not the fruit the owner planted.

A question to carry throughout: does Nāgasena deny that there is a person, or only that there is a person over and above the parts and processes? Those are very different claims, and they lead to very different ethics.

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6 replies

  1. Nima Tsering Gurung

    Contributor

    Week 1. I first read this in a tea house in Manang with a borrowed copy, and the chariot still works on me. What I notice now is that the king does the work. Nāgasena only asks questions, and the king himself admits the chariot is not the axle, not the wheels, not all of them together, and not something apart from them, and then has to say what "chariot" names. The answer, a designation dependent on parts, is the king's own conclusion. Very good teaching.

    Helpful · 1
  2. Kenneth Leung Chi-ho

    Fellow

    A warning about a false friend. People often say this is "Hume's bundle theory, two thousand years early". It isn't quite. Hume looks inward and fails to find a self among his perceptions. Nāgasena isn't reporting an introspective failure; he is analysing how a name refers to a collection of conditioned parts. And the Abhidhamma behind it has a detailed causal theory of how those parts condition each other, which Hume's bundle lacks. The family resemblance is real, but the arguments are different.

    Helpful · 2
  3. Arjun Iyer

    Fellow

    Since someone should say it: my tradition reads the chariot and agrees completely, about the chariot. The body and mind are designations over parts. But Advaita asks who it is that sees all this. Nāgasena dissolves the object side very well. The witness is never put on the table to be analysed, because it is the one doing the analysing.

    Helpful · 3
    1. Ayya Kusalañāṇī

      Fellow

      Arjun, that is the Upaniṣadic reply in its strongest form, and the Buddhist commentators knew it well. Their answer is that "the one doing the analysing" is itself a series of cognitions, each knowing its object, with no further knower behind. We can argue about which picture is more honest to experience. That is a good argument to have.

  4. Priya Raghavan

    Fellow

    Week 2, from a cognitive scientist. The flame through the night is a better model of the brain than most textbook metaphors. No molecule of the flame in the last watch was there in the first, but the flame in the last watch exists because of the first. Neuroscience is full of patterns like that: stable activity over changing material. "Neither the same nor another" sounds paradoxical until you think of any process.

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  5. Ayya Kusalañāṇī

    Fellow

    Week 3. The mango thief is the part I wanted us to reach. He says the mangoes he stole are not the ones the owner planted, and Nāgasena says he is still liable, because the stolen fruit came from what was planted. Responsibility rides on causal continuity, not on strict identity. That is exactly the move modern no-self views need, and it is made with a fruit tree.

    Helpful · 2