Questions of King Milinda Part 02

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

Page 19

>
INTRODUCTION.
xvii
This was already pointed out in my little manual, 'Buddhism,' published in 1877, and it is a pity that references in subsequent books to a supposed canon settled at Kanishka's Council have still perpetuated the blunder. M. Sylvain Lévi, for whose genius and scholarship I have the profoundest respect, does not actually say that there was such a canon; but his words must lead readers, ignorant of the facts, to imply that there was one.
I have also to add that M. Barth has called attention 1 to the fact that M. Sylvain Lévi has added another service to those already mentioned as rendered by him to the interpretation of the Milinda, by a discussion of the reference to our book in the Abhidharma-kosa-vyâkhyâ, referred to in my previous Introduction, p. xxvi. This discussion was published in a periodical I have not seen. But it seems that M. Lévi, with the help of two Chinese translations, has been able to show that the citation is not only in the commentary, but also in the text, of Vasubandhu's work. M. Léon Feer has been kind enough to send me the actual words of the reference, and they will be found published in the 'Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society' for 1891, p. 476.
Professor Serge d'Oldenbourg has also been good enough to point out to me that the two Cambridge MSS. of Kshemendra's Bodhisattvâvadâna-kalpalatâ read Milinda (not Millinda as given by Râjendra Lâl Mitra) as the name of the king referred to in the 57th Avadâna, the Stûpâvadâna. I had not noticed this reference to the character in our historical romance. It comes in quite incidentally, the Buddha prophesying to Indra that a king Milinda would erect a stúpa at Pâtaligrama. There is no allusion to our book, and the passage is only interesting as showing that the memory of king Milinda still survived in India at the time when Kshemendra wrote in the eleventh century A. D. Another reference to one of the characters in the Milinda
In the 'Revue de l'Histoire des Religions' for 1893 (which has only just reached me), p. 258.
'The Comptes rendus des Séances de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-lettres,' 1893, p. 232.
''Nepalese Buddhist Literature,' p. 65.
[36]
Digitized by
Google