Tuesday 18 September 2018

Repairing Milinda's Chariot


And the venerable Nagasena said to Milinda the king: "You, Sire, have been brought up in great luxury, as beseems your noble birth. If you were to walk this dry weather on the hot and sandy ground, trampling under foot the gritty, gravelly grains of the hard sand, your feet would hurt you. And as your body would be in pain, your mind would be disturbed, and you would experience a sense of bodily suffering. How then did you come, on foot, or in a chariot?" "I did not come, Sir, on foot. I came in a carriage." "Then if you came, Sire, in a carriage, explain to me what that is.
Is it the pole that is the chariot?" "I did not say that." "Is it the axle that is the chariot?" "Certainly not." "Is it the wheels, or the framework, or the ropes, or the yoke, or the
spokes of the wheels, or the goad, that are the chariot?" And to all these he still answered no. "Then is it all these parts of it that are the chariot?" "No, Sir." "But is there anything outside them that is the chariot?" And still he answered no. "Then thus, ask as I may, I can discover no chariot. Chariot is a mere empty sound. What then is the chariot you say you came in? It is a falsehood that your majesty has spoken, an untruth! There is no such thing as a chariot! You are king over all India, a mighty monarch. Of whom then are you afraid that you speak untruth?" And he called upon the Yonakas [Greeks] and the brethren to witness, saying: "Milinda the king here has said that he came by carriage. But when asked in that case to explain what the carriage was, he is unable to establish what he averred. Is it, forsooth, possible to approve him in that?"

What we see here is a classic philosophical paradox by which I mean an argument that proceeds impeccably to a conclusion that we are loth to accept. The usual mereological discussion is guided by Nagasena’s suggestion and begins with ‘proper parts’. This I suggest is to start from the wrong end. Our primary concepts are of wholes. Grasping that reality we can now break it down into its constituent parts over which the chariot ‘shadow’ hangs. What I mean by this is that you can then grasp ‘wheel’(chariot), ‘pole’ (chariot) etc. Your chariot schema is like an exploded parts diagram or an image where the part is highlighted and the rest is greyed out.

The chariot wheel for example we can grasp as a whole without even knowing that its parts are felloes (wheel), hub (wheel), spokes (wheel), tyre (wheel). Leave out that ‘wheel’ part and what you have is an eccentric sculpture.

Zeno’s paradox that starts with the notion of instants or discrete fractions of time also starts from the wrong end. The proper start is with the concept of a complete unit i.e. speed and the realisation that Achilles is not running the tortoise’s race for him.

Is this too simple? The critique of the concept of Atma, that is the purport of this parable, assumes that we build it up out of momentary states. Wrong end again. The Self is known with each state of awareness but they are not the parts that make it up.

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