150 THE SELF AS CONSTANTLY CHANGING
Like the chariot, “Nagasena” refers
to a set of elements that exist in a
state of mutual dependence.
Buddhists view the human being
as made up of five interdependent
skandhas (literally, heaps). These
are: form (our physical body);
sensations (information about the
world that is constantly fed to us
by our senses); perception (our
awareness of the world through
sensations); and mental formations
or impulses (our ongoing flow
of ideas, intentions, and thoughts
about the things we perceive).
The fifth skandha is consciousness:
the general sense we have of being
alive—including an awareness of
the information streaming in from
our senses, and of our thoughts,
ideas, and emotions.
The key feature of Nagasena’s
argument is that each of these
skandhas is constantly changing.
This is most obvious in the case
of form, or the physical body, as
we change from being a baby to an
adult through the physical process
of aging. But it is also true of the
other four skandhas: they too arein no way fixed. They reflect a
constantly changing stream of
experience and response as we
engage with life. This means that
not only is it impossible to point to
Nagasena, it is also impossible
to say whether anyone is the same
person during the course of one
lifetime. Nevertheless, we still have
a sense of a person being the same
over a lifetime, since each of us has
a past and a future. Nagasena
points out that it is absurd to say he
remains the same over time, but
likewise absurd to say he does not.
In fact, Nagasena insists that
the questions themselves are
wrong, because they presuppose
a fixed self instead of one that
is dependent upon the body. In a
further example to illustrate the
dependency of the self, Nagasena
asks Milinda to consider milk,
curds, butter, and ghee. These are
not the same things, but the three
later stages—curds, butter, and
ghee—cannot be made unless
milk first exists. That is to say thatWe think of people as fixed objects.
But Nagasena insists that the self is a
process of ongoing change that can no
more be pinned down than motion itself.A meeting of cultures
The meeting between King
Milinda and Nagasena occurred
in the context of a meeting of
cultures. Buddhism had spread
to northern India through the
teachings of missionaries sent
by the Emperor Asoka around
100 years earlier. Meanwhile,
the influence of classical Greece
was spreading eastward from
the Mediterranean, and, when
it reached northern India, it
was adopted by local rulers (a
process known as Hellenization).Milinda—or Menander, as he is
known in Greek—was one such
king. He ruled a region known
as the Indo-Greek Kingdom—in
present-day northwestern India
—in the 2nd century BCE, so we
may assume that Nagasena lived
in that area sometime between
the 2nd and 1st century CE.
While evidence of Milinda
exists in the form of coins and
references by classical writers,
we know very little about the
philosopher-monk Nagasena. Hisonly appearance in literature
is his dialogue with the King
in The Questions of King
Milinda, a widely respected
text in Theravada Buddhism
that was written in the 1st
century CE. One legend about
Nagasena states that while
living in Pataliputra (modern-
day Patna, India), he created
the Emerald Buddha, a jade
statue of Buddha clothed in
gold, which is now in Wat Phra
Kaew, Bangkok, Thailand.