Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction

item (the one that Milinda actually put first) might be more contentious, however. Mightn’t the material element, i.e. the body, be the thing that is conscious, has the dispositions, the perceptions, the feelings? When asked, in effect, whether the body is Nagasena, why is Nagasena so quick to say that it isn’t?
When someone presents a point as if it were pretty obvious when it doesn’t seem obvious to you at all, it is good tactics to look for something unspoken lying behind it. Perhaps they are assuming that a self, a person, must be something rather pure and lofty—notice the studiously repulsive description of the body with which the king prefaces his question. Or that a self must be a permanent, unchanging thing, quite unlike a body, perhaps even capable of surviving death. Either of those assumptions might have come from earlier philosophical/religious conceptions—back to that in a moment. Or maybe from some such thought as this: matter doesn’t move itself (just leave a lump of it lying around and see how much it moves), whereas an animal does—so there must be something non-material in it moving its matter. Or: even if matter does move it doesn’t make coherent, directed, intelligent movements—so a body needs something to direct it.
These thoughts were commonplace long before Questions of King Milinda was written. Remember the importance Socrates attaches to the well-being of his soul in Crito; or go on to read Plato’s Phaedo—the follow-up to Crito, about Socrates’ very last discussion and death. ‘Hold it a moment,’ you will say, ‘that’s Greece, whereas this is India.’ True, but very similar ideas are found (even earlier) in the Brahminical writings sacred to Hinduism. Admittedly, Buddhism quite consciously broke away from the Brahminical tradition. But the main points of contention were animal sacrifice and the caste system (which Buddhism abandoned along with all extreme forms of asceticism), so that a great deal of that tradition remained and formed the background to Buddhism as well. The idea of cyclical rebirth to further lives of suffering, and the hope of escape from the cycle into a state of liberation (the Buddhist nirvana and the Hindu moksha), are equally part of both.
Knowing these things may help us a little in understanding the prompt ‘No, sire’ with which Nagasena answers this sequence of questions. But it doesn’t help as much as we might wish, because it gives no hint as to why he should make the same response to the king’s last question, whether then Nagasena is something else, something different from the five ‘aggregates’. If anything, it might lead us to expect that he would say that Yes, it was something different, something that could leave the body and later inhabit another, that could be having certain feelings and perceptions now, and could have quite different ones in the future. But again he says ‘No sire’—it is not something else. So the puzzle remains. And Milinda’s next remark is puzzling too: he accuses the monk of having spoken a falsehood, for apparently ‘there is no Nagasena’. But Nagasena never said there was—quite the contrary, it was his perplexing remark that there wasn’t a person ‘Nagasena’ which set the discussion going.
You do meet traffic jams like this sometimes, and it would be a poor guide who tried to cover it up. We need some creative reading at this stage. For instance: are we to think of the king as just getting confused, and losing track of what has been said? Or is it that he simply can’t believe that there is no such person, and therefore thought that Nagasena was bound to answer ‘Yes’ to at least one of his questions; since he answered ‘No’ to all of them, at least one answer must have been false, and that is the falsehood the king means when he says ‘You, revered sir, . . . have spoken a falsehood’? Of those two (perhaps you can think of another?) I prefer the second. It fits better with the feeling one gets from the chapter as a whole that the king is supposed to have a mistaken view of the nature of the self about which Nagasena puts him right.
He does so (after briefly teasing Milinda about his pampered lifestyle) by asking a parallel series of questions about the king’s chariot. This tradition makes constant use of similes, parallels, and analogies; listeners are brought to feel comfortable with something they find problematic by coming to see it as similar to, or of the same kind as, something else with which they are already familiar. Here the hope is that once the king has answered ‘No’ to all the questions about the chariot, he will see how Nagasena could return the same answer to all his questions about the person.
And he does come to see it, by the end of the chapter. But first let me mention something which no study of this text by itself could reveal, but which would surely have had an effect on anyone of Milinda’s obvious learning and intelligence. In using a chariot as a parallel to a person, Nagasena is doing something both strongly reminiscent of, and at the same time shockingly at odds with, a metaphor well known within their common philosophical culture.
6. The image of the chariot (1). In a famous scene from the huge Indian epic, the Mahabharata, the warrior Arjuna has Krishna as his charioteer—and as his moral guide, not just his chauffeur!
7. The image of the chariot (2). In the Greek example the hero Hercules takes the reins, watched over by the goddess Athena.
Plato famously compared the self to a chariot. A good deal earlier, in the Indian tradition, the Katha Upanishad does the same (see References). Is it now Nagasena’s turn? Well, not exactly. It is as if the author were alluding to the tradition precisely to highlight his rejection of it. In Plato we read of a charioteer trying to control one obedient horse (reason) and