Questions of King Milinda Part 02

SR No.: 007682
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: T W Rhys Davids
Publisher: Oxford
Publication Year: 1894
Total Pages: 2240
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 38 MB

Page 75

IV, 6, 3.
OF MILINDA THE KING.
45
And again, O king, the Brahman Sabbamitta of distinguished descent, who was of high lineage in the land of Udikka', a philologist and grammarian, well read in the six Vedangas?, whom Suddhodana the king, the Bodisat's father, sent for, and having poured out the water of dedication from a golden vase, handed over the boy to his charge, to be taught—this was his second teacher 8.
And again, o king, the god who raised the agitation in the Bodisat's heart, at the sound of whose speech the Bodisat, moved and anxious, that very moment went out from the world in his Great Renunciation-this was his third teacher 4.
1 In the North-West. See Gâtaka 1, 140, &c.
i Khalangavantam. These are phonetics, prosody, grammar, exegesis, astronomy, and ritual. I was wrong in taking Childers's interpretation of this word at 'Buddhist Birth Stories,' p. 72.
This episode is also not in the Pitakas. On onogeti see Mahavagga I, 22, 18. Sabbamitra is given in the Thera Gatha, I, 150, as the name of a Thera, and in the Divyavadana, p. 420, as the name of Asoka's herald or court crier.
• There is nothing about any such devatâ in the Pitakas. Hînafi-kumburê takes it to mean the god who took the outward appearance of the four visions-an old man, a sick man, a dead man, and a recluse. But in that story-which is not related in the Pitakas of the Buddha, though it is referred to in connection with him at Buddhavamsa XXVI, p. 16—the god does not speak. The only god whose words are said, in any of the later Pali legends, to have agitated the Bodisat's heart at that moment, was the Evil One himself; and that only in one version of the legend, the Pali authority for which I cannot give. It is in Hardy's Manual,' p. 157, where the speech of the Evil One, placed at Gâtaka I, 63 at a later time, is said to have been made at the moment of the Renunciation. Even if it be not a mere blunder of Hardy's to put it at that time, still it cannot be the speech referred to by our author. For the startling doctrine that the Evil One himself was one of the Bodisat's teachers would never have been smuggled in, as it were, by concealing the identity of the spirit referred to under
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