Mrs Rhys Davids - The Milinda-Questions

First published in 1930 by
George Routledge & Sons Ltd

Reprinted in 2000 by
Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Transferred to Digital Printing 2007

1930 Mrs Rhys Davids

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A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library

The Milinda-Questions
ISBN 0-415-24475-7
Buddhism: 16 Volumes
ISBN 0-415-24286-X
Trbners Oriental Series
ISBN 0-415-23188-4
ISBN: 978-1-136-37776-1 (ePub)

FIGS. 1-3. Coins of King Menandros (Milinda) with the inscription Basileus Soteros Menandros. (Obverse and reverse.) Coins of him have been found in twenty-two places in N. India.

FIG. 4. Coin of King Dionysios, successor to Menandros, last of the dynasty. (Obverse and reverse.) The illustrations for this Plate have been reproduced by kind permission of the Keeper of Seals, British Museum. For fuller description see Cambridge History of India, I.

FIG. 1. Silver scroll discovered, in a silver vase, with a gold casket of minute bone relics, at Taxila, by Sir John Marshall ; reproduced here with his kind permission and that of the Superintendent, Government Printing Works, Calcutta, from A Guide to Taxila. The scroll is dated year 136 of Azes = A.D.76, and records in Kharoh, the gift of relics of the Holy One (the Buddha) to the Dharmrajik Stpa.

FIG. 2. Portion of one palm-leaf from the MS. brought from Nepal by B. H. Hodgson, and presented to the Royal Asiatic Society; photographed for this work by kind permission of the Council. The work is the Sanskrit Aa-shasrik-prajpdramit. The MS., of a quite unusual antiquity, bears a date = A.D. I165. It is not style-scratched like the leaf MSS. of S. Asia, but seems to be very fine calligraphy.

A LL we, who are inquiring into, or are just interested in the historical study of Sakya, now called Buddhism, are in a way, whether we like to think so or not, the heirs of the work of Rhys Davids. It is as one of these heirs, that I have here tried to exploit and develop the heritage he left us. One of his unrealized wishes, he wrote, had been to discuss the doctrines of the author of the Pali book Milindapaha , which he translated for Max Mllers series : Sacred Books of the East, comparing his standpoint with that of the earliest Buddhists, set out in the four great Nikyas, with that of the later books contained in the Pitakas, and with that of still later works not included in the canon at all. These words, taken from his introduction to the second volume of the translation, are dated 1894.

I do not think, considering the extent to which the materials to which he referred were still practically inaccessible, that the time for such a discussion was yet ripe. The non-appearance of any such mature historical discussion of the ideas in the work since that date goes far to show I speak truly. The works on the Milindapaha, published since that date, which have come to my ken are only four, and not one of the authors was in a position to do more than to deal quite superficially with the history of the ideas in it. These works are Garbes essay Der Milindapaha, ein kulturhistorischer Roman ,of 44 (small) pages in the little volume Indische Kultur-geschichte (Tbingen, 1903), nearly one-third of which is devoted to an account of the external conditions under which the book was produced, or at least begun. The second is a tenuous work by Dr. F. Otto Schrader, Die Fragen des Knig Menandros (Berlin, 1903), being a translation of only the greater part of the first 89 pages of the text, i.e. of the Conversations and the (late) introduction. Here discussion of the ideas is practically limited to detached footnotes, as it were in a teachers commentary, a way which certainly permits of many good aperus, but precludes effective general considerations. These are confined to an introduction on the accompanying and external historical conditions, together with a genetic theory of the compilation, with which I shall show only partial agreement. The third is a description, occupying 7 pages only, in Dr. M. Winternitzs