by Will Durant
The same method of departmental administration was applied to the government of the cities. Pataliputra was ruled by a commission of thirty men, divided into six groups. One group regulated industry; another supervised strangers, assigning to them lodgings and attendants, and watching their movements; another kept a record of births and deaths; another licensed merchants, regulated the sale of produce, and tested measures and weights; another controlled the sale of manufactured articles; another collected a tax of ten per cent on all sales. “In short,” says Havell, “Pataliputra in the fourth century B.C. seems to have been a thoroughly well-organized city, and administered according to the best principles of social science.”28a “The perfection of the arrangements thus indicated,” says Vincent Smith, “is astonishing, even when exhibited in outline. Examination of the departmental details increases our wonder that such an organization could have been planned and efficiently operated in India in 300 B.C.28b
The one defect of this government was autocracy, and therefore continual dependence upon force and spies. Like every autocrat, Chandragupta held his power precariously, always fearing revolt and assassination. Every night he used a different bedroom, and always he was surrounded by guards. Hindu tradition, accepted by European historians, tells how, when a long famine (pace Megasthenes) came upon his kingdom, Chandragupta, in despair at his helplessness, abdicated his throne, lived for twelve years thereafter as a Jain ascetic, and then starved himself to death. “All things considered,” said Voltaire, “the life of a gondolier is preferable to that of a doge; but I believe the difference is so trifling that it is not worth the trouble of examining.”29
II. THE PHILOSOPHER-KING
Ashoka—The Edict of Tolerance—Ashoka’s missionaries—His failure—His success
Chandragupta’s successor, Bindusara, was apparently a man of some intellectual inclination. He is said to have asked Antiochos, King of Syria, to make him a present of a Greek philosopher; for a real Greek philosopher, wrote Bindusara, he would pay a high price.30 The proposal could not be complied with, since Antiochos found no philosophers for sale; but chance atoned by giving Bindusara a philosopher for his son.
Ashoka Vardhana mounted the throne in 273 B.C. He found himself ruler of a vaster empire than any Indian monarch before him: Afghanistan, Baluchistan, and all of modern India but the extreme south—Tamilakam, or Tamil Land. For a time he governed in the spirit of his grandfather Chandragupta, cruelly but well. Yuan Chwang, a Chinese traveler who spent many years in India in the seventh century A.D., tells us that the prison maintained by Ashoka north of the capital was still remembered in Hindu tradition as “Ashoka’s Hell.” There, said his informants, all the tortures of any orthodox Inferno had been used in the punishment of criminals; to which the King added an edict that no one who entered that dungeon should ever come out of it alive. But one day a Buddhist saint, imprisoned there without cause, and flung into a cauldron of hot water, refused to boil. The jailer sent word to Ashoka, who came, saw, and marveled. When the King turned to leave, the jailer reminded him that according to his own edict he must not leave the prison alive. The King admitted the force of the remark, and ordered the jailer to be thrown into the cauldron.
On returning to his palace Ashoka, we are told, underwent a profound conversion. He gave instructions that the prison should be demolished, and that the penal code should be made more lenient. At the same time he learned that his troops had won a great victory over the rebellious Kalinga tribe, had slaughtered thousands of the rebels, and had taken many prisoners. Ashoka was moved to remorse at the thought of all this “violence, slaughter, and separation” of captives “from those whom they love.” He ordered the prisoners freed, restored their lands to the Kalingas, and sent them a message of apology which had no precedents and has had few imitations. Then he joined the Buddhist Order, wore for a time the garb of a monk, gave up hunting and the eating of I meat, and entered upon the Eightfold Noble Way.31
It is at present impossible to say how much of this is myth, and how much is history; nor can we discern, at this distance, the motives of the King. Perhaps he saw the growth of Buddhism, and thought that its code of generosity and peace might provide a convenient regimen for his people, saving countless policemen. In the eleventh year of his reign he began to issue the most remarkable edicts in the history of government, and commanded that they should be carved upon rocks and pillars in simple phrase and local dialects, so that any literate Hindu might be able to understand them. The Rock Edicts have been found in almost every part of India; of the pillars ten remain in place, and the position of twenty others has been determined. In these edicts we find the Emperor accepting the Buddhist faith completely, and applying it resolutely throughout the last sphere of human affairs in which we should have expected to find it—statesmanship. It is as if some modern empire had suddenly announced that henceforth it would practice Christianity.
Though these edicts are Buddhist they will not seem to us entirely religious. They assume a future life, and thereby suggest how soon the scepticism of Buddha had been replaced by the faith of his followers. But they express no belief in, make no mention of, a personal God.32 Neither is there any word in them about Buddha. The edicts are not interested in theology: the Sarnath Edict asks for harmony within the Church, and prescribes penalties for those who weaken it with schism;33 but other edicts repeatedly enjoin religious tolerance. One must give alms to Brahmans as well as to Buddhist priests; one must not speak ill of other men’s faiths. The King announces that all his subjects are his beloved children, and that he will not discriminate against any of them because of their diverse creeds.34 Rock Edict XII speaks with almost contemporary pertinence:
His Sacred and Gracious Majesty the King does reverence to men of all sects, whether ascetics or householders, by gifts and various forms of reverence.
His Sacred Majesty, however, cares not so much for gifts or external reverence, as that there should be a growth of the essence of the matter in all sects. The growth of the essence of the matter assumes various forms, but the root of it is restraint of speech; to wit, a man must not do reverence to his own sect, or disparage that of another, without reason. Depreciation should be for specific reasons only, because the sects of other people all deserve reverence for some reason or another.
By thus acting a man exalts his own sect, and at the same time does service to the sects of other people. By acting contrariwise a man hurts his own sect, and does disservice to the sects of other people. . . . Concord is meritorious.
“The essence of the matter” is explained more clearly in the Second Pillar Edict. “The Law of Piety is excellent. But wherein consists the Law of Piety? In these things: to wit, little impiety, many good deeds, compassion, liberality, truthfulness, purity.” To set an example Ashoka ordered his officials everywhere to regard the people as his children, to treat them without impatience or harshness, never to torture them, and never to imprison them without good cause; and he commanded the officials to read these instructions periodically to the people.35
Did these moral edicts have any result in improving the conduct of the people? Perhaps they had something to do with spreading the idea of ahimsa, and encouraging abstinence from meat and alcoholic drinks among the upper classes of India.36 Ashoka himself had all the confidence of a reformer in the efficacy of his petrified sermons: in Rock Edict IV he announces that marvelous results have already appeared; and his summary gives us a clearer conception of his doctrine:
Now, by reason of the practice of piety by His Sacred and Gracious Majesty the King, the reverberation of the war-drums has become the reverberation of the Law. . . . As for many years before has not happened, now, by reason of the inculcation of the Law of Piety by His Sacred and Gracious Majesty the King, (there is) increased abstention from the sacrificial slaughter of living creatures, abstention from the killing of animate beings, seemly behavior to relatives, seemly behavior to Brahmans, hearkening to father and mother, hearkening to elders. T
hus, as in many other ways, the practice of the Law (of Piety) has increased, and His Sacred and Gracious Majesty the King will make such practice of the Law increase further.
The sons, grandsons and great-grandsons of His Sacred and Gracious Majesty the King will cause this practice of the Law to increase until the eon of universal destruction.
The good King exaggerated the piety of men and the loyalty of sons. He himself labored arduously for the new religion; he made himself head of the Buddhist Church, lavished gifts upon it, built 84,000 monasteries for it,37 and in its name established throughout his kingdom hospitals for men and animals.38 He sent Buddhist missionaries to all parts of India and Ceylon, even to Syria, Egypt and Greece,39 where, perhaps, they helped to prepare for the ethics of Christ;40 and shortly after his death missionaries left India to preach the gospel of Buddha in Tibet, China, Mongolia and Japan. In addition to this activity in religion, Ashoka gave himself zealously to the secular administration of his empire; his days of labor were long, and he kept himself available to his aides for public business at all hours.41
His outstanding fault was egotism; it is difficult to be at once modest and a reformer. His self-respect shines out in every edict, and makes him more completely the brother of Marcus Aurelius. He failed to perceive that the Brahmans hated him and only bided their time to destroy him, as the priests of Thebes had destroyed Ikhnaton a thousand years before. Not only the Brahmans, who had been given to slaughtering animals for themselves and their gods, but many thousands of hunters and fishermen resented the edicts that set such severe limitations upon the taking of animal life; even the peasants growled at the command that “chaff must not be set on fire along with the living things in it.”42 Half the empire waited hopefully for Ashoka’s death.
Yuan Chwang tells us that according to Buddhist tradition Ashoka in his last years was deposed by his grandson, who acted with the aid of court officials. Gradually all power was taken from the old King, and his gifts to the Buddhist Church came to an end. Ashoka’s own allowance of goods, even of food, was cut down, until one day his whole portion was half an amalaka fruit. The King gazed upon it sadly, and then sent it to his Buddhist brethren, as all that he had to give.43 But in truth we know nothing of his later years, not even the year of his death. Within a generation after his passing, his empire, like Ikhnaton’s, crumbled to pieces. As it became evident that the sovereignty of the Kingdom of Magadha was maintained rather by the inertia of tradition than by the organization of force, state after state renounced its adherence to the King of Kings at Pataliputra. Descendants of Ashoka continued to rule Magadha till the seventh century after Christ; but the Maurya Dynasty that Chandragupta had founded came to an end when King Brihadratha was assassinated. States are built not on the ideals but on the nature of men.
In the political sense Ashoka had failed; in another sense he had accomplished one of the greatest tasks in history. Within two hundred years after his death Buddhism had spread throughout India, and was entering upon the bloodless conquest of Asia. If to this day, from Kandy in Ceylon to Kamakura in Japan, the placid face of Gautama bids men be gentle to one another and love peace, it is partly because a dreamer, perhaps a saint, once held the throne of India.
III. THE GOLDEN AGE OF INDIA
An epoch of invasions—The Kushan kings—The Gupta Empire—The travels of Fa-Hien—The revival of letters—The Huns in India—Harsha the generous—The travels of Yuan Chwang
From the death of Ashoka to the empire of the Guptas—i.e., for a period of almost six hundred years—Hindu inscriptions and documents are so few that the history of this interval is lost in obscurity.44 It was not necessarily a Dark Age; great universities like those at Taxila continued to function, and in the northwestern portion of India the influence of Persia in architecture, and of Greece in sculpture, produced a flourishing civilization in the wake of Alexander’s invasion. In the first and second centuries before Christ, Syrians, Greeks and Scythians poured down into the Punjab, conquered it, and established there, for some three hundred years, this Greco-Bactrian culture. In the first century of what we so provincially call the Christian Era the Kushans, a central Asian tribe akin to the Turks, captured Kabul, and from that city as capital extended their power throughout northwestern India and most of Central Asia. In the reign of their greatest king, Kanishka, the arts and sciences progressed: Greco-Buddhist sculpture produced some of its fairest masterpieces, fine buildings were reared in Peshawar, Taxila and Mathura, Charaka advanced the art of medicine, and Nagarjuna and Ashvaghosha laid the bases of that Mahayana (Greater Vehicle) Buddhism which was to help Gautama to win China and Japan. Kanishka tolerated many religions, and experimented with various gods; finally he chose the new mythological Buddhism that had made Buddha into a deity and had filled the skies with Bodhisattwas and Arhats; he called a great council of Buddhist theologians to formulate this creed for his realms, and became almost a second Ashoka in spreading the Buddhist faith. The Council composed 300,000 sutras, lowered Buddha’s philosophy to the emotional needs of the common soul, and raised him to divinity.
Meanwhile Chandragupta I (quite distinct, despite his name and number, from Chandragupta Maurya) had established in Magadha the Gupta Dynasty of native kings. His successor, Samudragupta, in a reign of fifty years, made himself one of the foremost monarchs in India’s long history. He changed his capital from Pataliputra to Ayodhya, ancient home of the legendary Rama; sent his conquering armies and tax-gatherers into Bengal, Assam, Nepal, and southern India; and spent the treasure brought to him from vassal states in promoting literature, science, religion and the arts. He himself, in the interludes of war, achieved distinction as a poet and a musician. His son, Vikramaditya (“Sun of Power”), extended these conquests of arms and the mind, supported the great dramatist Kalidasa, and gathered a brilliant circle of poets, philosophers, artists, scientists and scholars about him in his capital at Ujjain. Under these two kings India reached a height of development unsurpassed since Buddha, and a political unity rivaled only under Ashoka and Akbar.
We discern some outline of Gupta civilization from the account that Fa-Hien gave of his visit to India at the opening of the fifth century of our era. He was one of many Buddhists who came from China to India during this Golden Age; and these pilgrims were probably less numerous than the merchants and ambassadors who, despite her mountain barriers, now entered pacified India from East and West, even from distant Rome, and brought to her a stimulating contact with foreign customs and ideas. Fa-Hien, after risking his life in passing through western China, found himself quite safe in India, traveling everywhere without encountering molestation or thievery.45 His journal tells how he took six years in coming, spent six years in India, and needed three years more for his return via Ceylon and Java to his Chinese home.46 He describes with admiration the wealth and prosperity, the virtue and happiness, of the Hindu people, and the social and religious liberty which they enjoyed. He was astonished at the number, size and population of the great cities, at the free hospitals and other charitable institutions which dotted the land,* at the number of students in the universities and monasteries, and at the imposing scale and splendor of the imperial palaces.48 His description is quite Utopian, except for the matter of right hands:
The people are numerous and happy; they have not to register their households, or attend to any magistrates or their rules; only those who cultivate the royal land have to pay a portion of the gain from it. If they want to go they go; if they want to stay they stay. The king governs without decapitation or corporal punishments. Criminals are simply fined; . . . even in cases of repeated attempts at wicked rebellion they only have their right hands cut off. . . . Throughout the whole country the people do not kill any living creature, nor eat onions or garlic. The only exception is that of the Chandalas. . . . In that country they do not keep pigs and fowls, and do not sell live cattle; in the markets there are no butchers’ shops, and no dealers in intoxicating drinks.49
Fa-Hien ha
rdly noted that the Brahmans, who had been in disfavor with the Mauryan dynasty since Ashoka, were growing again in wealth and power under the tolerant rule of the Gupta kings. They had revived the religious and literary traditions of pre-Buddhist days, and were developing Sanskrit into the Esperanto of scholars throughout India. It was under their influence and the patronage of the court that the great Hindu epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, were written down into their present form.50 Under this dynasty, too, Buddhist art reached its zenith in the frescoes of the Ajanta caves. In the judgment of a contemporary Hindu scholar, the “mere names of Kalidasa and Varahamihira, Gunavarman and Vashubandu, Aryabhata and Brahmagupta, are sufficient to mark this epoch as an apogee of Indian culture.”51 “An impartial historian,” says Havell, “might well consider that the greatest triumph of British administration would be to restore to India all that she enjoyed in the fifth century A.D.”52
This heyday of native culture was interrupted by a wave of those Hun invasions which now overran both Asia and Europe, ruining for a time India as well as Rome. While Attila was raiding Europe, Toramana was capturing Malwa, and the terrible Mihiragula was hurling the Gupta rulers from their throne. For a century India relapsed into bondage and chaos. Then a scion of the Gupta line, Harsha-Vardhana, recaptured northern India, built a capital at Kanauj, and for forty-two years gave peace and security to a wide realm, in which once more native arts and letters flourished. We may conjecture the size, splendor and prosperity of Kanauj from the one unbelievable item that when the Moslems sacked it (1018 A.D.) they destroyed 10,000 temples.53 Its fine public gardens and free bathing tanks were but a small part of the beneficence of the new dynasty. Harsha himself was one of those rare kings who make monarchy appear—for a time—the most admirable of all forms of government. He was a man of personal charm and accomplishments, writing poetry and dramas that are read in India to this day; but he did not allow these foibles to interfere with the competent administration of his kingdom. “He was indefatigable,” says Yuan Chwang, “and the day was too short for him; he forgot sleep in his devotion to good works.”54 Having begun as a worshiper of Shiva he was later converted to Buddhism, and became another Ashoka in his pious benefactions. He forbade the eating of animal food, established travelers’ rests throughout his domain, and erected thousands of topes, or Buddhist shrines, on the banks of the Ganges.