About this episode
The Questions of Milinda is one of the most renowned texts within Theravada Buddhism—and one of the most translated Buddhist texts around the world. The text follows a transformational philosophical dialogue between the Indo-Greek king Milinda and a Buddhist monk named Nagasena as they discuss the nature of the self, the meaning of renunciation, and the sources of knowledge. In her new translation of The Questions of Milinda , scholar Maria Heim devotes particular attention to the literary and aesthetic qualities of the text, presenting it as a literary classic as well as a philosophical one. In this episode of Tricycle Talks , Tricycle ’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with Heim to discuss the literary and aesthetic qualities of The Questions of Milinda , how treating Buddhist texts as literature can deepen our perception, what we can learn from the text’s famous chariot analogy, and the philosophical work that metaphors and analogies can perform.