Milinda’s Questions

The Milindapanha is a Buddhist text which purports to record a series of conversations between King Milinda (Greek Menandros, Latin Menander), king of Bactria, and the monk Nagasena. Bactria was one of the Asian Greek kingdoms founded in the aftermath of Alexander the Great’s conquest of portions of Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent; it was located within present-day Afghanistan and the Punjab. Menander reigned circa 160-140 B.C, and the Milindapanha as we have it is believed to have been composed around the first century A.D. The earliest extant versions are in Pali and Chinese, but scholars believe, based on linguistic evidence in the Pali, that the text was originally composed in Sanskrit, from which both the Pali and the Chinese were translated. The Pali text is available online in two parts (here and here ) at the University of Goettingen.

The Milindapanha was first translated into English by T. W. Rhys Davids, and published as The Questions of King Milinda in the Sacred Books of the East series(Oxford 1890-1894). This entire translation is online here at the Internet Sacred Books Archive. Later, I. B. Horner made a second English translation entitled The Milinda Questions (London 1969). More recently Bhikku Pesala, an English monk, has translated an abridged version of the text, which is online (in PDF format) here.

There are good things to be said for both of these online translations. Pesala’s version is perhaps somewhat better for the casual reader; his abridgements lessen some of the repetitiveness of the text without sacrificing anything of substance, and translation is attractively prepared in book format, whereas the online Sacred Books version is marred by a number of typographical and formatting errors. The latter does, however, include Rhys Davids’s copious footnotes, which readers with scholarly interests will find beneficial.

Shorter excerpts from the Milindapanha in English are also available online at BuddhaSasana, Access to Insight, and Jamyang Puntsog’s page, and in French at Paramita. This Indonesian translation of the text is apparently complete.

There are (so far as I’ve been able to find) two substantial scholarly discussions of the Milindapanha online. One is this comparative study of the Sanskrit and Chinese versions of the text, by Bhikku Thich Minh Chau of the Vietnamese Buddhist Research Institute. The other is An Assessment of the Highlights in the Milindapanha by W. Pachow, originally published in the Chung-Hwa Buddhist Journal. Both are very much worth reading, and I’ll try to have something to say about their principal findings in subsequent posts.