Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor

by Charles R. Allen

  With the best candidate gone Henry Colebrooke now had to cast about for someone to take his place. Leyden’s place as Assay Master of the Calcutta Mint had been filled by his deputy, a bright twenty-three-year-old assistant surgeon named Horace Hayman Wilson. Amiable, gentlemanly and well connected, Dr Wilson was the antithesis of Leyden in almost every respect, having come to India with no more than a solid grounding in medicine, chemistry and assaying. He was an inappropriate choice for the Secretaryship of the Asiatic Society, but on accepting the post Wilson set about proving himself worthy of the task.

  Wilson’s duties as Secretary led him to Sir William Jones’s Sanskrit translations. Wishing to understand his work a little better he cast around for a Sanskrit–English dictionary and found there was none, which led him to conclude that his only course was to write his own dictionary. It took him the best part of a decade, but it led to his gaining such a mastery of the language that he could eventually lay claim to be the leading Sanskritist of the age.

  But that pre-eminence came at a price, which was that Dr Horace Hayman Wilson held the post of Secretary of the Asiatic Society for almost twenty-two years. After Colebrooke retired from India in 1814, other Presidents of the Society came and went but none with real authority, so that Wilson’s position was never challenged, allowing him free rein to order the Asiatic Society’s affairs from its impressive new building at the corner of Chowringhee and Park Street very much as he thought fit. A tireless advocate for Indian rights, Wilson opened the membership of the Asiatic Society to Indians and worked no less zealously to promote his twin interests: Sanskrit and amateur theatricals – this last hobby reinforced by his marriage to the granddaughter of the actress Sarah Siddons.

  Among Wilson’s many accomplishments was the setting up of a Sanskrit college in Calcutta, established in 1824, to match that in Benares. However, his main claims to fame rest with his Sanskrit Grammar, his translations of a number of ancient verse dramas and his work on the eighteen Puranas. These last were supposed to have been written by Veda Vyasa, the compiler of the Vedas, but Wilson’s scholarship showed them to be Brahmanical reinterpretations of early history presented as prophecy, none written earlier than the second century of the Christian era. Drawing on earlier dynastic records, the composers of the Puranas had highlighted the deeds of those who had abided by the rules of kingship as laid down in the ancient texts, which decreed that monarchs be drawn from the Kshatriya warrior caste but always under the guidance of Brahman ministers, the Kshatriyas representing the arms of the Hindu body politic, the Brahmans the head. When these caste rules of kingship were broken, divine retribution invariably followed, as in the notorious case of the usurping low-caste Nandas.

  Wilson is also remembered for his discovery and translation of a long-forgotten document: the Rajatarangini, or ‘River of Kings’, a chronicle of the kings of Kashmir written in the form of a poem in 118 verses by a twelfth-century Brahman poet named Kalhana. Although mostly devoted to events that had occurred during or just before the poet’s lifetime, Kalhana had also drawn on earlier historical sources to write about Kashmir prior to the Muslim invasions. And if these sources were to be believed, the ‘heretical faith of Bauddha’8 had at one time dominated that region.

  According to the River of Kings, Buddhism had been introduced to Kashmir by a king named Ashoka. This King Ashoka had founded the city of Shrinagar in the Kashmir valley, built numerous temples in the valley and caused Buddhism to be taken to adjoining countries, including Tartary. Yet the author of the River of Kings displayed a marked hostility towards Ashoka, in striking contrast to his regard for Ashoka’s son and successor Jalauka, a ‘prince of great prowess’ who after becoming a devout worshipper of Shiva ‘overcame the assertions of the Bauddha heresies, and quickly expelled the Mlecchas [foreigners without caste] from the country’. However, even King Jalauka had turned out to be a less than model ruler, for towards the end of his reign he had begun to look favourably upon the Buddhists, an attitude his son and successor King Damodara had then enlarged on to such a degree that he had incurred the ‘the enmity of the Brahmanical order’.

  If this King Ashoka who had brought Buddhism to Kashmir was the same as the Ashoka listed in the dynastic tables of the Puranas as the third ruler of the Mauryan dynasty of Magadha, then he was patently a powerful ruler, with enough authority to challenge the established order of Kashmir with his heretical religion. The puzzle, for Wilson, was that neither Jalauka nor Damodara, nor Ashoka’s named father and grandfather, were listed in any of the Puranic tables.

  It was now clear that the authors of the River of Kings and the Puranas had a common Brahmanical aversion to Buddhism and Buddhist rulers. Indeed, something of that prejudice seemed to colour their translator’s thinking, for Horace Hayman Wilson showed little enthusiasm for areas of scholarship that fell outside his own pet subject: Brahmanical Sanskrit. For all his virtues, he lacked the breadth of vision that had made possible the great advances achieved under Sir William Jones. During his long Secretaryship of the Asiatic Society, the network of correspondents that had been such an important factor in the days of Jones and Colebrooke simply fell apart for lack of a directing force at the centre. New discoveries in the field came and went without acknowledgement, with little attempt made to assess their significance or to relate them to what had gone before.

  This was particularly true of Buddhist studies, despite the fact that many hitherto unknown religious texts were now coming to light in China, Ceylon and Burma, both canonical works and collections of Buddhist tales such as the Divyavadana, or ‘Divine Stories’. All added substance to the earlier suppositions of Orientalists that Buddhism had Indian origins. Gautama Sakyamuni Buddha, the Sage of the Sakyas, had now emerged from the realms of myth and was shown to have lived in the kingdom of Magadha in the central Gangetic plains, where after attaining a state of enlightenment at the age of thirty-five, he had preached for forty-five years, proclaiming his message of Dharma, or ‘Moral Law’, so as to ‘bring salvation to all living beings’. At the age of eighty-two he had expired – a state described in Buddhist texts as the Mahaparinirvana, or ‘Great Final Extinguishing’ – an event that had apparently taken place in the year 544 BCE.9

  This last dating was the work of a Scots surgeon-cum-botanist named Francis Buchanan.10 Few individuals played a greater part in the rediscovery of Buddhism’s Indian roots than Buchanan and none has been so undeservedly neglected. As a young surgeon attached to diplomatic missions to Burma and Nepal, Buchanan had the luck to observe two markedly different forms of living Buddhism at first hand. He was subsequently employed by the EICo to make surveys of territories newly acquired by the EICo in Madras. Then in 1809 he began a second round of surveying, this time in Bihar, newly added as a province to the EICo’s Bengal Presidency.

  This survey took Buchanan seven years to complete and showed Bihar to be strewn with ruins of great antiquity. One of these was the temple of Buddha-Gaya (today the Mahabodhi temple at Bodhgaya), eighty miles due south of Patna. Here Buchanan found what was to all appearances a dilapidated Hindu temple, occupied by a group of Hindu devotees and surrounded by scores of stone images of apparently Hindu deities. The devotees showed particular interest in two objects: a stone platform, which they referred to as the ‘Feet of Vishnu’, and a pipal tree said to have been planted by the great god Brahma.

  The Mahabodhi temple at Bodhgaya, drawn by Sir Charles D’Oyly in December 1824. The artist and his contemporaries had no idea of the significance of the temple or of the pipal tree growing beside it. ‘The Temple’, wrote D’Oyly, ‘is situated on a broad terrace, at the West corner of which is one of the finest Pepul Trees in the country … It is chiefly here that the Pilgrims offer up their prayers.’11 (APAC, British Library)

  Quite by chance Buchanan met a local man who claimed to be a Buddhist. He had been converted some years earlier by two Burmese pilgrims, agents of the king of Ava, who were travelling through India ‘in search of the holy places
made remarkable by the actions of Gautama’.12 These Burmese had told the convert that Gautama was a ‘lawgiver’ who long ago had resided at Buddha-Gaya under the protection of a king named Dharma Asoka, that the temple had once been ‘the centre of religion in India’, and that it was still held in the highest veneration by the people of Ava. Indeed, the temple’s stone platform and the pipal tree beside it had been revered by Buddhists long before the Hindus had ever claimed them. Furthermore, both platform and tree pre-dated the building of the Buddha-Gaya temple, which itself was the work of the king Dharma Asoka: ‘It was agreed by both the parties that came from Ava, that Gautama resided at Buddh Gaya, and that at his desire a temple was built by Dharma Asoka, king of Padaripuk [Pataliputra], who held his court at the place.’

  Upon examination, most of the stone images that the Hindu devotees had appropriated proved to be the same as the Buddhist statues Buchanan had seen in Burma and Kathmandu. Patently, the Dharma Asoka temple at Buddha-Gaya had indeed been a Buddhist temple.

  As Buchanan continued his survey of South Bihar it became increasingly obvious that the Buddhist convert’s claims had some basis in fact: that the area had indeed been a centre of Buddhism. Three days’ march north of Bodhgaya was the town of Rajgir, or ‘House of Kings’, named in the Puranas as the home of King Jarasandha, first king of Magadha. But, according to Buchanan’s Buddhist informant, Rajgir was equally important to Buddhists as the capital of a monarch named Bimbisara, during whose lifetime Sakyamuni Buddha had taught his creed.

  From Rajgir Buchanan led his survey party to the all but deserted town of Bihar and its fort, and then westwards to the little village of Baragang (today Baragaum). Here Buchanan ‘observed an immense mass of ruins, through which may be traced the foundations of many brick walls and buildings, among which rise several conical mounds that seem to have been temples’. The convert was unable to offer any explanations but a Jain monk came forward to inform Buchanan that these were the remains of the palace of a Raja Srenik and his ancestors: ‘The priest says that at the time of Srenik [Sen], the bulk of the people worshipped the Buddhas, and he disclaims all the images and ruins as belonging to those infidels.’

  Buchanan and his men set about surveying the most conspicuous of the ruins, ‘an immense range of building running north and south, near the west side of the above mentioned mass, for about 2000 feet, and in general 240 feet wide. It has consisted of nearly regular quadrangular courts, surrounded by buildings … It has for ages been a quarry for bricks, and the devastation goes rapidly on, but still great quantities remain.’13 Poking out from the larger cone-shaped mounds were a number of statues, the best-preserved of which Buchanan’s draftsmen sketched before the party moved on. What they had unwittingly discovered were the ruins of the Great Monastery of Nalanda, the once-famous Buddhist university burned to the ground by Muhammad Bakhtiyar and his mujahideen 518 years earlier.

  In 1814 ill-health forced Buchanan to cut short his survey work. He had been led to believe that the post of Superintendent of the EICo’s botanic gardens at Calcutta was his for the asking, but a quarrel with the Governor General over the ownership of his papers led to his resignation. He returned to Scotland empty-handed, leaving his reports, journals and drawings to be filed away in the Writers’ Building in Calcutta, where they remained unread for the next twenty-two years.

  Much the same fate befell Buchanan’s equally industrious contemporary and fellow Scot, the military engineer and map-maker Colin Mackenzie, who over this same period was making important advances in the field of Jain studies in South India. Mackenzie had joined the EICo as an engineer officer at the unusually late age of twenty-eight and after the overthrow of Tipu Sultan of Mysore in 1799 had spent a decade leading a team of translators, draughtsmen and mapmakers on a survey of the newly won territory of Mysore and the Deccan. Like Jones before him, Mackenzie was quick to acknowledge the debt he owed to the devoted Brahmin pandits and Jains who served as his assistants, and to whom he was no less devoted. ‘The connexion then formed with one person, a native and a Bramin,’ he afterwards wrote of the start of this relationship, ‘was the first step of my introduction into the portal of Indian knowledge; devoid of any knowledge of the languages myself, I owe to the happy genius of this individual the encouragement and the means of obtaining what I so long sought.’14

  The Brahmin in question was a twenty-year-old named Cavelli Venkata Boria, a scholar ‘of the quickest genius’ who spent seven years at Mackenzie’s side before dying of a fever: ‘From the moment the talents of the lamented Boria were applied, a new avenue of Hindoo knowledge was opened, and though I was deprived of him at an early age, his example and his instructions were so happily followed up by his bretheren and disciples, that an establishment was gradually formed, by which the whole of our provinces might be gradually analyzed on the method thus fortuitously begun.’ This happy ‘establishment’, made up of Indians and a number of British draughtsmen and paid for by Mackenzie out of his own pocket, allowed him to indulge in his passion for collecting old manuscripts, coins, drawings, sculptures and anything else that caught his antiquarian eye.

  One of the many Jain texts collected by Mackenzie was the Parisishtaparvan, the work of a twelfth-century polymath named Acharya Hemachandra that might be freely translated as The Lives of the Jain Elders.15 This threw new light on the founder of the Mauryan dynasty kings of Magadha, in the form of a detailed account of Chandragupta’s rise to power with the help of the Brahman Chanakya. In this Jain version of events Chandragupta’s mother is from a community that keeps royal peacocks, mora in Pali; mayura in Sanskrit. Her chieftan husband is killed and she is forced to go into hiding with the infant Chandragupta. One day the boy is seen by a Jain ascetic, who is the Brahman Chanakya in disguise. Chanakya has been humiliated by King Nanda of Magadha and has been forced to flee his wrath, and is now plotting revenge. Seeing Chandragupta lording it over other village boys, he recognises in him all the qualities of leadership required of a monarch, so he kidnaps him and educates him to take on that role. Chanakya and Chandragupta together launch an attack on Pataliputra that fails. Chanakya recognises his mistake in attacking Nanda directly and after retreating to the Himalayan regions he forms a military alliance with the mountain king Parvataka. The allies then embark on a long military campaign taking region by region until finally capturing Pataliputra and forcing King Nanda into exile.

  Chandragupta marries one of King Nanda’s daughters and Parvataka another, but the latter is accidentally poisoned by his new bride, leaving Chandragupta as the sole ruler and with Chanakya as his chief minister. This event is said to have taken place 155 years after the death of Sakyamuni Buddha’s contemporary Mahavira, the founder of Jainism.

  Here was the story of Chandragupta’s rise to power very much as told in the verse drama The Minister’s Signet Ring, except that the Jain text had more to say on Chandragupta’s rule. By this account a Jain saint named Bhadrabahu guides King Chandragupta through a period of lawlessness and a twelve-year famine. He also leads the king away from heretical teachers – in this context, religions other than Jainism, since The Lives of the Jain Elders and other Jain texts all agree that the great emperor Chandragupta ended his life as a Jain devotee, abdicating his throne in order to become a disciple of Bhadrabahu and following him to South India.16

  Colin Mackenzie flanked by his Jain and Brahmin pandits. A detail from an oil painting by Thomas Hickey executed after Mackenzie’s appointment as Surveyor General. (APAC, British Library)

  Mackenzie’s close contacts with Brahmins and Jains help to explain why he remained all but unaware of India’s Buddhist past until very late in his life. However, in February 1797, while making a topographic survey of the country south of the Krishna River (in eastern Andhra Pradesh), Mackenzie received a report of ‘antiquities’ uncovered by a local raja while collecting building material. He lost no time in diverting to the place he initially named Amarapoor – but better known today as Amaravati. The antiquities
had come to light when the raja’s workmen had begun to dig into a vast circular mound composed almost entirely of large bricks. They had found the mound to be encircled by a ring of large marble pillars and slabs, the latter carrying carvings in bas-relief that showed quite exceptional artistry and sophistication. Mackenzie left the site empty-handed, but not before he had had an opportunity to view some of the decorated slabs. One in particular, showing a king on an elephant directing an armed assault on a fortified town, was judged by Mackenzie to be the finest carving he had ever seen in India.17

  His professional duties kept Mackenzie occupied elsewhere for the next seventeen years, but in December 1813 he took some local leave and travelled up the Ganges on what was his own version of the Grand Tour, visiting sites of antiquarian interest and, as always, employing his own draughtsmen to make drawings and watercolours. At Delhi he visited Firoz Shah’s Lat and what remained of its companion on Delhi Ridge. At Allahabad he saw his third column – and then a fourth at Bakhra (Vaishali) in northern Bihar. At Benares he visited the ruins at Sarnath, still quite unaware that they were Buddhist. By now one of the two cenotaph-like structures that had been there in Jonathan Duncan’s time had been demolished for its building material. The remaining structure was described to Mackenzie as ‘the Samaudh [cenotaph] of Rajah Booth-Sain at Sara-Nath’. Its general shape was not unlike what he had seen at Amaravati in 1797 but he failed to make the connection.