Milindapanha
Milindapanha
Buddhist teachings on non-self and rebirth can survive rigorous logical scrutiny without appeal to revelation, shown through a sustained cross-examination by a skeptical Greek king and answered with analogy, most famously the chariot that has no single part identifiable as 'the chariot.'
- the chariot analogy for a self with no unchanging essence
- a historically attested Greek king (Menander I) as dialogue partner
- logical cross-examination rather than appeal to revelation
- evidence of Greco-Buddhist intellectual contact in Gandhara
Records dialogues between the historically attested Indo-Greek king Menander I, called Milinda in Pali, who ruled a Greek kingdom in the northwest, and the Buddhist monk Nagasena, who resolves the king's logical objections to Buddhist doctrine. Not part of the core Tipitaka in most traditions but treated as quasi-canonical, included in the Khuddaka Nikaya in the Burmese recension, it is a literary composition rather than a transcript, but it stands as evidence of the Greco-Buddhist cultural contact of the period, in the wake of Alexander's successor kingdoms in Bactria and Gandhara.
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