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 76

I, 26. :
BUDDHIST EDUCATION.
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26. And then, when he had been admitted to the Order, the venerable Nagasena said to the venerable Rohana : 'I have adopted your dress; now teach me that hymn.'
Then the venerable Rohana thought thus to himself: 'In what ought I first to instruct him, in the Discourses (Suttanta) or in the deeper things of the faith (Abhidhamma)?' and inasmuch as he saw that Nâgasena was intelligent, and could master the Abhidhamma with ease, he gave him his first lesson in that.
And the venerable Nâgasena, after hearing it repeated but once, knew by heart the whole of the Abhidhamma — that is to say, the Dhamma Sangani, with its great divisions into good, bad, and indifferent qualities, and its subdivisions into couples and triplets — the Vibhanga, with its eighteen chapters, beginning with the book on the constituent elements of beings—the Dhâtu Katha, with its fourteen books, beginning with that on compensation and non-compensation—the Puggala Paññatti, with its six divisions into discrimination of the various constituent elements, discrimination of the various senses and of the properties they apprehend, and so on 2-the Katha Vatthu, with its thousand sections, five hundred on as many points
Compare, for instance, p. 125 of the edition of this summary of Buddhist ethical psychology, edited for the Pali Text Society, by Dr. Edward Müller, of Bern (London, 1885).
? The six kinds of discrimination (Paññatti) referred to, are those set out in § 1 of the Puggala. The work itself is an ethical tractate dealing only with the last of the six (the discrimination of individuals). See the edition by Dr. Morris, published by the Pâli Text Society (London, 1883).
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