King Menander’s dialogue with a Buddhist monk in a complete 12th-century manuscript

Nagasena (Nasen Bikuyo). Nasen Biku Kyo [Milindapanha - Questions of King Milinda].

€ 135.000,00

A late-Heian witness to one of Buddhism’s most consequential Indian dialogues. This two-volume Japanese manuscript of the Milindapanha, transmitted in East Asia under the title "Nasen Biku Kyo", preserves the older recension of the text, traditionally regarded as closer to the original form, and survives in a copy whose material history remains legible in the object itself.

The work transmits the celebrated exchange between the Indo-Greek king Menander, remembered in Buddhist tradition as Milinda, and the monk Nagasena, whose name is reflected in the Japanese title. Rooted in the intellectual world of north-western India in the centuries after Alexander’s eastern campaigns, the dialogue stands at a remarkable cultural intersection, at which Hellenistic kingship encountered Buddhist scholastic reasoning. Its enduring fame lies in the precision with which Buddhist doctrine is tested through royal interrogation, above all in discussions of personal identity, rebirth, and the nature of the self.

The Japanese two-volume recension is of particular interest because it is considered older than the expanded three-volume version and closer to the earliest transmitted state of the text. This manuscript therefore matters not merely as a late Heian survival, but also as a witness to the reception in Japan of a work whose authority ultimately derives from the cosmopolitan Buddhist culture of ancient India.

Each volume is composed of 14 conjoined sheets on yellowish paper, written in a disciplined hand of generally 30 lines with up to 17 characters each. No colophon is present; the manuscript is a complete twelfth-century copy, with both parts preserved in full. The surviving Ishiyamadera ownership seal places it within a canon whose principal phase of accumulation belongs to the late Heian period, while its paper, ruling, and formal page layout confirm a date in the twelfth century. At the opening of the first volume appears the black seal of the Ishiyamadera temple; in the second volume only traces of erasure remain. The lower part of the character 'jing' is cut off by later trimming - a revealing physical witness to the restoration and remounting carried out in the Tenmei-Kansei period. The present covers and text leaves strongly suggest that the manuscript originally existed as a scroll and was only then reconfigured as a folded album. The manuscript thus joins two histories of transmission: the long movement of an Indian Buddhist classic across languages and regions, and the custodial life of the Ishiyamadera canon in Japan. Few objects show so clearly how an early Japanese manuscript book could preserve, in materially altered yet textually authoritative form, the afterlife of a foundational debate from the Buddhist world of ancient north-western India.