Welcome to Milinda’s Questions.
This blog takes its name from the Milindapanha, or “The Questions of King Milinda.” For those who aren’t familiar with the work, here’s a description from a recent translator:
Composed around the beginning of the Christian era, and of unknown authorship, the Milindapanha is set up as a compilation of questions posed by King Milinda to a revered senior monk named Nagasena. This Milinda has been identified with considerable confidence by scholars as the Greek king Menander of Bactria, in the dominion founded by Alexander the Great, which corresponds with much of present day Afghanistan. Menander’s realm thus would have included Gandhara, where Buddhism was flourishing at that time.
What is most interesting about the Milindapanha is that it is the product of the encounter of two great civilizations - Hellenistic Greece and Buddhist India - and is thus of continuing relevance as the wisdom of the East meets the modern Western world. King Milinda poses questions about dilemmas raised by Buddhist philosophy that we might ask today. And Nagasena’s responses are full of wisdom, wit, and helpful analogies.
I can’t promise that you’ll find “Wit, wisdom, and helpful analogies” on this blog. (For that matter, many modern readers won’t find much of that in what Nagasena had to say, either.) And it would be pretentious of me to claim that this blog will be a “product of the encounter between two great civilizations.” My goal is more modest: to do philosophy, in the sense that Stanley Cavell had in mind when he said:
[T]o confront my words and life as I pursue them with the life my culture’s words may imagine for me: to confront the culture with itself, along the lines in which it meets in me. This seems to me a task that warrants the name of philosophy.
The line that confrontation traces out in me right now is through such topics as Buddhist meditative traditions and contemporary Western analytic philosophy, particularly the philosophy of mind. I make no guarantees as to where it will lead, though; and I do promise it will meander over a variety of topics while getting there.
milindapanha
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