Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction

one disobedient horse (the appetites); the Katha Upanishad compares the self to someone riding in a chariot, the intellect to the charioteer directing the senses, which are the horses. Nagasena doesn’t mention any horses. More importantly, he doesn’t mention a charioteer, let alone a rider distinct from the charioteer. That is the very picture he is reacting against. There is no permanent presence, the self, directing or overseeing. This author, in using the hallowed simile of the chariot but using it differently, is simultaneously putting his own view and signalling, to his cultural circle, just what he is rejecting.
So now the monk, following exactly the same pattern, questions the king: ‘Is the axle the chariot?—are the wheels the chariot? . . .’ . Milinda repeatedly answers ‘No.’ That isn’t surprising—but much as Nagasena’s answers to his questions were fairly unsurprising except for the last, so one of Milinda’s answers will raise nearly every reader’s eyebrows. This time, however, it isn’t the last but the next to last. Nagasena asks whether then the chariot is ‘the pole, the axle, the wheels, . . . the reins and the goad all together’. Most of us would say ‘Yes; so long as we are not talking about these parts lying around in a heap but rather in the proper arrangement, that’s exactly what a chariot is.’ But Milinda just says ‘No, revered sir.’
We shall shortly find out what lies behind this rather odd response. For the moment let us just notice that the king, having answered ‘No’ to all the questions, has put himself in the same position as had Nagasena, who immediately throws Milinda’s own earlier words back at him: ‘Where then is the chariot you say you came in? You sire, have spoken a falsehood . . .’ —and gets a round of applause even from Milinda’s supporters. But the king is not for caving in. That was no falsehood, he says, for ‘it is because of the pole, the axle . . . and the goad that “chariot” exists as a mere designation’. Just so, replies Nagasena, and ‘Nagasena’ exists as a mere designation too, because the five ‘aggregates’ are present. And he quotes the nun Vajira:
Just as when the parts are rightly set
The word ‘chariot’ is spoken,
So when there are the aggregates
It is the convention to say ‘a being’.
The king is impressed, and the chapter ends happily. But just what (you may well ask) have he and Nagasena agreed on? That ‘chariot’, ‘self’, ‘person’, ‘being’, and ‘Nagasena’ are conventional terms? But aren’t all words conventional—in England ‘cow’, in France ‘vache’, in Poland ‘krowa’, whatever local convention dictates? Surely they are telling us more than that?
Indeed they are. This is not about the conventionality of language; it is about wholes and their parts, and the point is that wholes are in a sense less real, less objective, and more a matter of convention, than are the parts that compose them. To begin with, the parts are independent in a way that the whole is not: the axle can exist without the chariot existing, but not the chariot without the axle. (As the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) said much later, wholes have only a ‘borrowed’ reality—borrowed from the reality of their parts.) Furthermore, what counts as a whole is not given by nature, but depends to some extent on us and our purposes. If from a chariot we remove the pole and one of the wheels, the collection of parts that remains is not incomplete in itself, but only with regard to what we want chariots for.
But why does all this matter? Why did Nagasena provoke this conversation in the first place? Not just to pass the time, we may be sure. The point is important to him because he holds that what we believe has an effect on our attitudes and through them on our behaviour. That, surely, is perfectly reasonable: those, for instance, who believe that the word ‘God’ stands for something real might be expected to feel and perhaps also behave differently from those who think it is just a socially constructed way of speaking. To use the jargon: our metaphysics (what we think reality is fundamentally like) can affect our ethics. Now on the Buddhist view the purpose of philosophy (indeed the purpose of Buddhism) is to alleviate suffering; there is no point in it if it doesn’t. And a major cause of suffering is overestimation of the importance of the self, its needs, and its goals: ‘clinging to self’, as Buddhists say. So any change of belief which downgrades the status of the self in our eyes is helpful. A Tibetan text says: ‘Believing the ego to be permanent and separate, one becomes attached to it; . . . this brings on defilements; the defilements breed bad karma; the bad karma breeds miseries . . . ’. That is why it matters.
Can Nagasena be said to have proved his case in this chapter? Has he really shown that there is no abiding self, just an unstable composite which it is convenient to call a person? Surely not. Even if we accept everything which he and Milinda say about the chariot, it would still have to be argued that the chariot analogy is reliable when it comes to thinking about a person, yet on that point Nagasena says nothing at all. So like most analogies, this one is useful as an illustration or explanation of what the doctrine about the self means, but not as evidence that it is true. Nor do we learn why he gave the crucial answer (‘No, sire’) to the king’s final and crucial question, the one to which a supporter of the permanent self would have said Yes: ‘is Nagasena apart [distinct] from material form, feeling, perception, mental formations and consciousness?’
So our provisional verdict must be ‘unproven’. But we might ask ourselves whether this question (‘Has Nagasena proved his case?’) is the right question to be asking. Perhaps it is,