Questions of King Milinda Part 01

Author(s): T W Rhys Davids
Publisher: Oxford

Page 16

INTRODUCTION.
phecy, put into the mouth of the Buddha when on his death-bed, that this discussion would take place about 500 years after his death, and that it inserts further, at the point indicated in my note on p. 3 of the present version, an account of how the Simhalese translator came to write his version. His own account of the matter adds to the details given above that he wrote the work at the Uposatha Arâma of the Maha Wihara near Sri-wardhana-pura,'a place famous for the possession of a temple containing the celebrated Tooth Relic, and a monastery which had been the residence of Weliwita Saranankara, the Samgha-råga, and of the famous scholars and commentators Daramiti-pola Dhamma-rakkhita and Madhurasatota Dhammakkhandha.'
As Kîrtti Srî Râga-simha reigned till 1781', this would only prove that our Pâli work was extant in Ceylon in its present form, and there regarded as of great antiquity and high authority, towards the close of the last century. And no other mention of the work has, as yet, been discovered in any older Simhalese author. But in the present deplorable state of our ignorance of the varied and ancient literature of Ceylon, the argument ex silentio would be simply of no value. Now that the Ceylon Government have introduced into the Legislative Council a bill for the utilisation, in the interests of education, of the endowments of the Buddhist monasteries, it may be hoped that the value of the books written in those monasteries will not be forgotten, and that a sufficient yearly sum will be put aside for the editing and publication of a literature of such great historical value 2. At present we can only deplore the impossibility of tracing the history of the Questions of Milinda' in other works written by the scholarly natives of its southern home.
That it will be mentioned in those works there can be
See Turnour's Mahavansa, p. lxviii.
I believe that none of the many vernacular literatures of India can compare for a moment with the Simhalese, whether judged from the point of view of literary excellence, variety of contents, age, or historical value. And yet a few hundreds a year for ten years would probably suffice, on the system followed by the Pali Text Society, for the editing and publication of the whole.
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