Questions of King Milinda Part 01

SR No.: 007681
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: T W Rhys Davids
Publisher: Oxford
Publication Year: 1890
Total Pages: 2695
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 47 MB

Page 66

I, 16.
ASSAGUTTA.
II
go and put his questions to them1. [6] But they all alike, being unable to satisfy the king by their solution of his problems, departed hither and thither, or if they did not leave for some other place, were at all events reduced to silence. And the brethren of the Order went, for the most part, to the Himalaya mountains.
16. Now at that time there dwelt, in the mountain region of the Himalayas, on the Guarded Slope, an innumerable company of Arahats (brethren who, while yet alive, had attained Nirvâna). And the venerable Assagutta, by means of his divine power of hearing, heard those words of king Milinda. And he convened an assembly of the Order on the summit of the Yugandhara mountain, and asked the brethren: 'Is there any member of the Order able to hold converse with Milinda the king, and resolve his doubts?'
Then were they all silent. And a second and a third time he put the same question to them, and still none of all the number spake. Then he said to the assembled Order: There is, reverend Sirs, in the heaven of the Thirty-three 2, and east of the Vegayanta palace, a mansion called Ketumati, wherein dwells the god Mahâsena. He is able to hold converse with Milinda the king, and to resolve his doubts.' And the innumerable company of
This paragraph is so unnecessary after what has been said in the preceding episode, and at the same time so contradictory to the fact of two teachers at least living in or near the city, that it would really seem probable that it (or perhaps § 14) came originally directly after § 10, the rest being an interpolation, and a clumsy one.
* These are the principal gods of the Vedic pantheon.
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