Incarnations

by Sunil Khilnani

  Some other suggested reading for Pakistani military schools might be a 1937 essay published in Calcutta’s Modern Review. It attacks a young politician then still on the rise in India’s freedom movement, Jawaharlal Nehru, for his authoritarian, antidemocratic tendencies and his will to dominate. Its author was Chanakya, the variant of Kautilya—clearly a pseudonym. The real author was in fact Nehru himself, who only a decade later would become democratic India’s first elected leader, and who did much to establish India as a democracy, serving for many years in Parliament House. But his article implied that inside every democrat is a Chanakyan, totalitarian temptation: that Kautilya is the Mr. Hyde lurking in every democratic Dr. Jekyll.

  5

  ASHOKA

  Power as Persuasion

  304–232 BCE

  Every time someone mails a letter or hands over a currency note in India, every time an Indian bureaucrat stamps a document with an official seal, they are handling a symbol that dates back over two thousand years: four lions sculpted in stone, one facing in each direction. The man who created this potent and enduring icon is a towering, mysterious figure in India’s history, a king from the third century BCE whose ideas (above all, that a ruler must accept the diversity of his subjects’ beliefs) were long forgotten, but returned to inspire the modern-day Indian state.

  We know him today by the name Ashoka. To look at, he was unprepossessing—a bit of a lens breaker, as they say in Bollywood: short, fat, and famously afflicted by bad skin. Yet he was a lucky man, too, known in his lifetime as Devanampriya, “beloved of the gods.” He transformed what was still a nascent sect, Buddhism, into a world religion, transmitting its ethical vision across the subcontinent and the rest of Asia. And most unusually for a royal (in any country at the time or since), he spread his ideas not through violence, but through moral force and persuasion.

  Emperor Ashoka reigned for nearly forty years, during an era when persuasion was not the usual modus operandi. He came to power around 268 BCE, when the Romans were fighting Carthage in the first of the Punic Wars, when Persia was engulfed in a civil war, and when, in China, the first Qin emperor was building his Great Wall. Most of the world’s other empires were trapped in warfare and isolationism. Ashoka’s message was off-chord: it was about the need to reduce suffering and to pursue peace, openness, and tolerance. It was a message he took to his people through dozens of edicts, carved in stone and scattered the length and breadth of the subcontinent and beyond. Many of the edicts were on craggy rocks in remote corners such as Erragudi in today’s Andhra Pradesh; some were etched in polished pillars and erected at strategic locations. And beside many of these pillars were Ashoka’s lions, gazing down from on high.

  * * *

  Ashoka came from India’s first great empire, the Mauryan dynasty. He was the grandson of Chandragupta, who created the empire by force and who may have learned his lessons in realpolitik from the Arthashastra. (Some believe Kautilya [4] was Chandragupta’s minister, though that’s unlikely.) The Mauryan martial style of imperial conquest was continued by Ashoka’s father, Bindusara, and Ashoka himself further extended the empire across the subcontinent, encompassing pretty much all of it except the southern tip. It wasn’t until the British Raj that so much of India was incorporated under a single ruler again.

  Empires are won by arms, but they are sustained by communications. Like their Roman contemporaries, the Mauryans built extensive roads. The most important of these was the Uttarapatha, or northern route, the Mauryan Royal Highway that began in Taxila, in the northwest plains of today’s Pakistan. It swung down some two thousand kilometers to Pataliputra, the Mauryan capital, whose traces are now buried beneath the heaving city of Patna, in the eastern Indian state of Bihar. The highway drew a physical connection between the very different groups under Mauryan rule, from master-slave societies to caste-based farming communities to forest dwellers; from speakers of Greek and Aramaic to those who used Prakrit and other Indian languages. The route was later remade by the Mughals, and then by the British, as the Grand Trunk Road, or GTR, now India’s smoky National Highway 1.

  Where Ashoka stood out, even among the Mauryans, was in his mastery of communication. “Wherever there are stone pillars or stone slabs,” he declared, in what is now known as the Seventh Pillar Edict, his words were to be engraved so that they “may long endure … as long as my sons and great-grandsons reign and as long as the sun and the moon shine.” Like his lion capital, they have endured, speaking to us across more than two millennia. The Seventh Edict appears on a pillar that today stands in the ruins of Delhi’s Feroz Shah Kotla, but fragments of the same edict have also been unearthed as far west as Kandahar. We know of thirty-three edict texts altogether, and it seems likely each was inscribed at hundreds of sites throughout the empire. One has been found as far south as Karnataka.

  As the Canadian scholar Harold Innis (a teacher of Marshall McLuhan) once argued, empires come in two forms. Some embed themselves in time: they favor heavy materials like stone and clay in which to record their communications, and this allows them to aspire to permanence, but requires that they rule in a more decentralized fashion. Other empires embed themselves in space: they tend to use lighter, more ephemeral materials (such as papyrus, paper, and palm leaf) that can be easily disseminated. This achieves a more centralized, but often less lasting, control. Ashoka was decidedly in the first camp.

  The edicts were chiseled mainly in Prakrit (in a script known as Brahmi), the language spoken in the core area of Ashoka’s empire, though several have been found in Greek and Aramaic scripts. Most of the edicts speak of Ashoka in the third person, but in some inscriptions, an enigmatic I surfaces, giving us a glimpse of his sensibility. He commanded his vast empire, he wanted his people to know, by hard work and a listening ear:

  I have made the following arrangement: the reporters may appear before me for reporting the affairs of the people at any time and place, whether I am engaged in eating or am in the harem or in the bed-chamber or on a promenade or in a carriage or on the march.

  One rock inscription, discovered a few decades ago on the wall of a rock shelter at Panguraria, in central India, is unexpectedly intimate, at least in one version: “The king, who is called Priyadarsin [‘lovely to behold’] once came to this place on a pleasure tour while he was still a prince, living together with his unwedded consort.” Not all scholars would accept that translation, but here, in words that cut through clouds of legend and centuries of religious and later nationalist consecration, one might detect the pulse of the young prince.

  * * *

  To reconstruct Ashoka’s life, we can glean clues from the rock inscriptions and from archaeological finds, and sift through religious stories, especially Buddhist ones. Both the legends and Ashoka’s own words describe a life split in two, much like the life of the man who became his ethical master. The first part was spent in pursuit of worldly pleasure and power, and in the exercise of brutality. The dispensing of moral instruction and benefaction came later.

  The legends say that his father, the emperor Bindusara, took a dislike to the young Ashoka and sent him first to distant Taxila. The city had been part of Achaemenid Persia’s sphere of influence—a cosmopolitan crossroads, far from the center of Mauryan power, where Ashoka was required to put down a rebellion. He was then sent as viceroy to the city of Ujjain, in central India. On his way there he fell in love with the daughter of a local merchant (the consort mentioned in that intimate wall graffiti). “Pleasure tours” seem to have become a pastime, earning him the name Kamashoka, “pleasure-seeking Ashoka.”

  Bindusara had chosen Ashoka’s elder brother, Susima, to succeed him. But at their father’s death, Ashoka rebelled. He killed Susima and, according to some legends, ninety-eight other brothers, the sons of Bindusara by various wives—more realistic is the story that has him killing off a mere six. What’s clear is that it was a bloody, protracted struggle for the throne. Only after four years did Ashoka feel secure enough to crown hi
mself. He was thirty-four years of age, hardly young; but he celebrated his accession by marrying another princess. Though his pleasure harem was large, some women found him repulsive. It is said he had them burned alive. Candashoka he was sometimes called: “Rage-filled Ashoka.”

  Brutal intemperance also marked his first campaign of imperial conquest, in 261/60 BCE, a war against the Kalingas, who ruled what is now Odisha state. “One hundred and fifty thousand persons were carried away captive,” Ashoka had inscribed on a Rock Edict. “One hundred thousand were slain, and many times that number died.” This victory took the Mauryan Empire eastward to the shores of the Bay of Bengal, and established Ashoka’s sway for the next three decades. Yet the conquest was so bloody that it seems to have triggered something in Ashoka. He declared his remorse, and his life took a sharp swerve toward the embrace of ideas that were still comparatively fresh in India: the teachings of the Buddha (1).

  * * *

  In Buddhist traditions across Asia, Ashoka is a revered figure, a world conqueror who became a world renouncer, a paragon for Buddhist rulers and regimes today. The stories of his conversion come from Buddhist legends, produced many centuries after his death, so a proselytizing agenda is inevitable. In preconversion days, he seemed like the vilest reprobate, the better to show how Buddhism transformed him! It’s Shakespeare’s Prince Hal trick, but a good deal more gruesome.

  There are legends about Ashoka in most major Asian languages: Sanskrit and Pali, but also Chinese, Japanese, Burmese, Tibetan, Thai, and Sinhala. Many of them tell of his furthering the faith by building eighty-four thousand stupas to house the Buddha’s relics and to mark the eighty-four tenets of his teaching. So fervent was Ashoka’s devotion that he gradually bankrupted the treasury, giving away everything to the Buddhist order of monks, the sangha, down to his last mango. Ashoka, once the lord of India, or Jambudvipa, the “Land of Cherry Plums,” ended up as lord of half a cherry plum. Such exemplary devotion led to the conquest of Buddhism over Asia.

  Legends aside, in India, Ashoka used the faith to create an exceptional doctrine of rule, one that may have stemmed from regret over his youthful aggression, but was also a shrewd response to the empire he controlled. The Mauryan world was a hub with many connections. Ashoka’s grandfather, Chandragupta, had links with classical Greece, and it is said that as a young man, Chandragupta met Alexander the Great. Chandragupta is thought to have followed the teachings of the Buddha’s contemporary Mahavira (2), and to have become an adherent of the Jain faith, ending his life according to Jain teachings by slow, regulated starvation. Ashoka’s father, Bindusara, wrote to King Antiochus I, ruler of a now-forgotten empire in what is present-day Turkey, asking for sweet wine, figs, and a Sophist philosopher.

  These interconnections brought change to the Mauryan economy. The increase of wealth and the urbanization that characterized the Buddha’s period accelerated, along with demands from lower orders for a greater share in society’s privileges. Ashoka was governing a far more varied society than any previous Indian ruler. To maintain a grip over the vast spread and variety of his realm, a task for which force would never have been adequate, he needed a unifying worldview. What he created was his own extraordinary version of dhamma—infusing this concept, which the Buddha had borrowed and reinterpreted from Brahminic usage, with many of his own ideas.

  * * *

  Ashoka’s dhamma was, for both the sovereign and his society, a moral code of action by which he sought to rule, and one that he exhorted his subjects to follow. It focused on worldly deeds and was designed to dampen social conflicts. It spoke for tolerance and against zealotry and violence. It described a ruler’s duty to interest himself in the health and happiness of his people. It even committed him to planting banyan trees and mango groves along the roads, to provide water and resting places for travelers. And, although Ashoka was a follower of the Buddha, under his own dhamma he pledged to protect all his subjects, whatever their religious beliefs. It was a remarkable early statement of the distinction between the private faith of a leader and the responsibilities of public office.

  While the Mauryan world was radically different from our own, the ideas Ashoka advocated are as arrestingly familiar as Kautilya’s—though in happily different ways. He spoke of the need for moderation and impartiality, urging his subjects to leave behind “tendencies like jealousy, anger, cruelty, haste, stubbornness, laziness, and fatigue … The principle of all this is to avoid inconsistency and haste in the exercise of your functions.” Impartiality, consistency, deliberation—all solid liberal constitutional values, and it is remarkable to find a ruler who could connect them into an integrated vision so early in recorded history. Equally striking was Ashoka’s articulation of the notion of moral progress—implicit in Buddhism, but which we tend to think of as a modern idea. As he states in Rock Edict IV: “Promulgation of dhamma has increased that which did not exist over many centuries: abstention from killing, kindness to creatures, respect to relatives, respect for Brahmins and Shramanas, and obedience to mother, father and elders. This dhamma conduct has increased in diverse ways, and will increase more thanks to King Piyadassi, beloved of the gods.”

  But perhaps Ashoka’s most resonant statement is Rock Edict XII. It is a call for religious tolerance and civility in public life—or, as he puts it, “restraint in speech”:

  … that is, not praising one’s own religion or condemning the religion of others without good cause … Whoever praises his own religion, due to excessive devotion, and condemns others with the thought “Let me glorify my own religion” only harms his own religion. Therefore, contact between religions is good. One should listen to and respect the doctrines professed by others. Beloved-of-the-gods, King Piyadassi, desires that all should be well learned in the good doctrines of other religions.

  “Restraint of speech” is a brilliant, if also potentially illiberal, formulation. It isn’t the sort of inclusive political philosophy that a ruler could practice alone. To make sure his empire embraced dhamma, Ashoka addressed his people directly, going on dhammayatas, or “dhamma tours,” during which he preached and held discussions. And it was in a surprisingly frank, gently cajoling voice, without the kingly bombast one might expect, that he ordered his scribes and stonemasons to chisel into great stones and pillars across the length and breadth of India, creating landscapes that resolved themselves into words and sentences. While most of the inscriptions are now lost to us, new ones are still being discovered—most recently at Ratanpurwa, in Bihar, in 2009.

  In modern times, the idea of a country dominated by messages emanating from a single brain may evoke Orwell’s Ministry of Truth or North Korea’s ubiquitous billboards and tinny loudspeakers. Indeed, the Rock Edicts were not all tending toward the toasty liberal. One forbade unofficial gatherings—perhaps because those meetings could be used to criticize the king’s heterodox ideas. Ashoka also created a special class of officials, dhamma-mahamatas, or “dhamma superintendents,” who were instructed to spread the word across the population—a creepy echo of Kautilya’s roving armies of spies and mischief makers. Yet Ashoka’s edicts said that true conquest was the conquest by piety and virtue, and that these ideas could not be enjoined by force:

  Beloved-of-the-gods, King Piyadassi, speaks thus: This progress among the people through dhamma has been done by two means, by dhamma regulations and by persuasion. Of these, dhamma regulation is of little effect, while persuasion has much more effect. The dhamma regulations I have given are that various animals must be protected … But it is by persuasion that progress among the people through dhamma has had a greater effect in respect of harmlessness to living beings and the non-killing of living beings.

  Ashoka did not always live up to his pronouncements, especially in his later years, when he seems to have become more religiously devout, even zealous. He ordered dissident monks to be expelled from Buddhist monasteries, he acknowledged the persistence of war, and he was aggressive in his treatment of forest dwelllers who were chal
lenging his rule. He became, in some of the later Buddhist portrayals that praise his fervor, a “monster of piety.”

  * * *

  Ashoka died in 232 BCE. In the following decades, the Mauryan Empire went into decline. Eventually, Ashoka himself was largely forgotten in, or effaced from, the Indian imagination. The Prakrit language and Brahmi script fell into disuse, and no one knew how to read his edicts. For centuries, he seems to have lived on mainly in Buddhist texts outside India—though some scholars now believe that, like the Buddha’s, his challenge to Brahminical orthodoxy and his advocacy of ideas such as ahimsa (the protection of all living beings) provoked active rebuttals. Works such as the Hindu epic the Mahabharata, in which his name appears, might be seen as a response to Ashoka’s particular brand of dhamma as much as to Buddhist ideas.

  It was British gentleman scholars, the now-mocked Orientalists, who rediscovered Ashoka in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. William Jones (21) started the work, but it was his successor James Prinsep who deciphered the Brahmi script, becoming the first man in many centuries to comprehend the edicts. In the words of his fellow Ashokan explorer Alexander Cunningham, he lifted “the thick crust of oblivion” that had settled over the Mauryan world.

  After the British rediscovered him, Ashoka went on to become an inspiration to India’s nationalists. He was plucked out of the legends portraying him as a Buddhist ruler and incarnated in a new national myth as a historical Indian king who, with his unifying political will, stood above any single religion and embodied universal principles of justice and nonviolence. Here was an Indian ruler who could symbolize the ambitious agenda of cultural and religious pluralism that both Gandhi and Nehru believed necessary for India. Nehru’s vision for the new nation did not expunge religion from public life, but recognized its value as a realm of vital individual choice and expression, which therefore required equal space for all faiths. It looked a lot like Ashoka’s version of religious restraint.