King Menander

We need history, certainly, but we need it for reasons different from those for whicg the idler in the garden of knowledge needs it, even though he may look nobly down on our rough and charmless needs and requirements. We need it, that is to say, for the sake of life and action.
- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

King Menander was a Greek who reigned in what is now Pakistan during the first or second century. He was among the rulers of the time who embraced, or was at least familiar with, Buddhism. The Milindapanha consists of Menander's conversations with an elderly Buddhist monk called Nagasena, and had particularly struck the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges.

One passage begins with Menander asking Nagasena his name. Nagasena says that his name is "only a generally understood term, a practical designation. There is no question of a permanent individual implied in the use of the word."

Menander replies, "If there is no permanent individuality, who gives you monks your robes and food, lodging and medicines? And who makes use of them? Who lives a life of righteousness, meditation and reaches nirvana? Who destroys living beings, steals, fornicates, tells lies, or drinks spirits . . . If your fellow monks call you Nagasena, what then is Nagasena? Would you say that your hair is Nagasena? Or your nails, teeth, skin, or other parts of your body, or the outward form, or sensation, or perception, or the psychic constructions, or consciousness? Are any of these Nagasena? Are all these taken together Nagasena? Or, anything other than they?"

Nagasena answers no to all of Menander's questions.

Menander says, "Then for all my asking I find no Nagasena. Nagasena is a mere sound! Surely what your reverence has said is false!"

Nagasena asks Menander, "Your majesty, how did you come here - on foot, or in a vehicle?"

Menander replies, "In a chariot."

"Then tell me," Nagasena asks, "what is the chariot? Is the pole the chariot?"

"No, your reverence," Menander replies.

"Or the axles, wheels, frame, reins, yoke, spokes, or goad?"

Menander replies that none of these things is the chariot.

"Then all these separate parts taken together are the chariot?"

Menander again says no.

"Then is the chariot something other than the separate parts?"

"No, your reverence," Menander says.

"Then for all my asking, your magesty," Nagasena says, "I can find no chariot. The chariot is a mere sound. What then is the chariot? Surely what your Majesty has said is false! There is no chariot!"

Menander protests that what he had said was not false. "It is on account of all these various components, the pole, axle, wheels and so no, that the vehicle is called a chariot. It's just a generally understood term, a practical designation."

"Well said, your Majesty!" Nagasena replies. "You know what the word chariot means! And it's just the same with me. It's on account of the various components of my being that I am known by the generally understood term, the practical designation, Nagasena."
(adapted from The Questions of King Milinda by T.W. Rhys Davids, 1890 by Pankaj Mishra in An End To Suffering - The Buddha in the World, 2004)

There are many such clear and simple exchanges in the Milindapanha, illustrating the individual identity as a construct, a composite of form, feelings, thought, impulse and consciousness, but without an unchanging unity or integrity.

"I think, therefore, I am," Descartes has said, but the dialogue between Menander and Nagasena intellectually refutes the Cartesian "I" by implying that one cannot speak of a separate self or mind thinking "I think" inside the body, inasmuch as the self is nothing but a series of thoughts. It suggests that the "I" is not a stable and autonomous entity and indeed is no more than a convenient label for the provisional relations among its constantly changing physical and mental parts.

In zazen, one directly sees the incoherence present where there supposedly is a self, of how we're led along by stray thoughts, memories and moods, and how we imagine that nothing else exists beyond these illusions.