6th Postgraduate Conference, Leeds
03/05/2015
C T Green
Plato’s Phaedo & the Buddhist Milindapañha
Contextualisation:
The Buddha c.480-400BCE; Milinda/Menander 2nd century BCE; Milindapañha 2nd century
BCE – 1st century CE
Milinda – a Bactrian Greek king
Nāgasena – an Indian Buddhist monk
Content:
1 the appeal of death for Plato’s ideal philosopher and the enlightened Buddhist monk; 2 the
craving for corporeality that keeps an individual rooted in a cycle of rebirth and unsatisfactoriness; 3 a specific metaphor of life as a sea that requires a raft of understanding,
and the use of rivers and flood imagery; and 4 the concept of ascent out of water and into the
air above.
1. Death’s Appeal
1.1 Death is: ‘the release of the soul from the body’ (Phd. 64c); ‘a complete passing away,
without cleaving to the world’ (Miln. II.1.5.31).
2. Craving Corporeality
2.1 (Miln. III.6.1.74):
Just so, great king, with the recluses and the body. Without cleaving to it do
they bear about the body for the sake of righteousness of life. The body, O king, has
been declared by the Blessed One to be like a wound. And therefore merely as a
sore, and without cleaving to it, do the recluses bear about the body.
2.2 (Miln. II.3.4.52):
Where there is sensation there is a longing, where there is longing there is a
grasping, where there is grasping there is a becoming, where there is becoming
there is birth, and at birth old age and death, grief, lamentation, pain, sorrow, and
despair begin to be.
Dukkha – Unsatisfactoriness/suffering – the true nature of the world
2.3 Phaedo’s un-satisfactory human existence:
‘a sort of lock-up (φρουρᾷ)’ (62b3-4), ‘chains of the body (δεσμῶν ἐκ τοῦ σώματος)’ (67d12), ‘imprisoned once more in a body (ἐνδεθῶσιν εἰς σῶμα)’ (81e2), and ‘soul is a helpless
(ἀτεχνῶς) prisoner (διαδεδεμένην), chained (προσκεκολλημένην) hand and foot in the body
(σώματι)’ (82e); after death a soul can be ‘rid for ever of human ills (ἀπηλλάχθαι τῶν
ἀνθρωπίνων κακῶν)’ (84b3-4); ‘philosophers make dying their profession’ (67e) and
‘everyone except the philosopher regards death as a great evil’ (68d); ‘I have such a poor
opinion of our weak human nature (ἀνθρωπίνην ἀσθένειαν ἀτιμάζων)’ (107b1); ‘We do not
realize that we are living (οἰκοῦντας) in its hollows (κοίλοις)’ (109c3-4); how one must have
‘abandoned those other pleasures (ἡδονὰς) and adornments, the bodily (σῶμα) ones, as
foreign to his purpose’ (114d8-e2).
2.4 The unsatisfactory nature of the human sphere is predicated on the fundamental
distinction between soul and body (Phd. 80b-6) - (Gallop, 1975):
03/05/2015
6th Postgraduate Conference, Leeds
C T Green
soul is most similar to what is divine, immortal, intelligible, uniform,
indissoluble, unvarying, and constant in relation to itself; whereas body, in its
turn, is most similar to what is human, mortal, multiform, non-intelligible, dissoluble,
and never constant in relation to itself.
3. Seas of Life: Subterranean Rivers & the Flood
3.1 the ‘soul brings calm to the seas (γαλήνην) of desire’ (Phd. 84a); ‘select the best and most
dependable theory that human intelligence can supply, and use it as a raft (σχεδίας) to ride
(διαπλεῦσαι) the seas of life (βίον)’ (Phd. 85d).
3.2 Saṃyutta Nikāya (Miln. II.1.10.36):
By faith he crosses over the stream,
By earnestness the sea of life;
By steadfastness all grief he stills,
By wisdom is he purified.
3.3 The language of purification is prevalent throughout the Argument from Affinity (Phd.
78b-84b). Specific examples include: 79d; 80e; 81b; 82b9-c1; 82d.
3.4 Saṃsāra – the cycle of birth, death, rebirth; sustained by desire.
3.5 Dharma – a double meaning of Truth and the teachings of the Buddha
3.6 The concluding myth images are: ‘monstrous unceasing subterranean rivers (ὕδωρ ῥεῖν)’
(Phd. 111d4); ‘rivers (ποταμοὶ) flow together (συρρέουσί), and from it they flow forth again
(πάλιν ἐκρέουσιν)’ (Phd. 112a5-6); and ‘monstrous (δεινούς) winds (ἀνέμους)’ (Phd. 112b8).
3.7 ‘All foolish individuals, take pleasure in the senses and in the objects of sense, find
delight in them, continue to cleave to them. Hence are they carried down by that flood, they
are not set free from birth, old age, and death, from grief, lamentation, pain, sorrow, and
despair, - they are not set free, I say, from suffering’ (Miln. III.4.6.69).
4. Glaucus the Sea God
4.1(Phd. 109d-110a):
Now we are in just the same position...we are too feeble and sluggish (ἀσθενείας καὶ
βραδυτῆτος) to make our way out to the upper limit (ἔσχατον) of the air (ἀέρα). If
someone could reach to the summit, or grow wings (πτηνὸς) and fly aloft, when he
put up his head (ἀνακύψαντα) he would see the world above, just as fishes (ἰχθύες)
see our world when they put up their heads (ἀνακύπτοντες) out of the sea...For this
earth and its stones and all the regions in which we live are marred and corroded, just
as in the sea everything is corroded by the brine (ἅλμης), and there is nothing worth
mentioning that grows there, and scarcely any degree of perfect formation, but only
eroded rocks (σήραγγες) and sand (ἄμμος) and measureless (ἀμήχανος) mud
(βόρβοροί).
4.2 (Miln. III.6.3.75)
'Is there such a thing, O king, as a lotus flower with a hundred petals?' 'Yes, there is.' 'Where
does it grow up?' 'It is produced in mud, and in water it comes to perfection.' 'But does the
lotus resemble the mud of the lake, whence it springs up, either in colour, or in smell, or in
taste?' 'Certainly not.' 'Then does it resemble the water?' 'Nor that either.' 'Just so, great king,
03/05/2015
6th Postgraduate Conference, Leeds
C T Green
is it that the Blessed One had the bodily signs and marks you have mentioned, though his
parents had them not.'
4.3 (Phd. 69c3-7):
All the time there has been a hidden meaning beneath their claim that he who
enters the next world uninitiated (ἀμύητος) and unenlightened shall lie in the
mire (βορβόρῳ), but he who arrives there purified and enlightened shall dwell
among the gods.
Bibliography:
Clay, D. ‘The art of Glaukos (Plato Phaedo 108d4-9)’, American Journal of Philology 106
(1985), 230-236.
Dillon, M. ‘Dialogues with Death: The Last Days of Socrates and the Buddha’, Philosophy
East and West 50 (2000), 525-558.
Gallop, D. Plato Phaedo (Oxford 1975).
Giles, J. ‘The No-Self Theory: Hume, Buddhism, and Personal Identity’, Philosophy East &
West 43 (1993), 175-200.
Lee, D. Plato: Republic (London & New York 1974).
Rhys Davids, T.W. The Sacred Books of the East (Oxford 1890).
Sick, D.H. ‘When Socrates Met the Buddha: Greek and Indian Dialectic in Hellenistic Bactria
and India’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 17 (2007), 253-78.
Sorabji, R. Self: Ancient and Modern Insights about Individuality, Life, and Death (Chicago
& Oxford 2006).