Armed with Lieutenant Burt’s copies of ‘No. 1’ from Allahabad and the Asiatic Society’s set of copies of ‘No. 1’ from Firoz Shah’s Lat copied four decades earlier by Captain Hoare, James Prinsep now set out to determine if this was indeed the case. He began by making a painstaking analysis of the alphabet: ‘I soon perceived that each radical letter was subject to five principal inflections, the same in all, corresponding in their nature with the five vowel marks of the ancient Sanscrit No. 2. This circumstance alone would be sufficient to prove that the alphabet is of the Sanscrit family, whatever the language may be.’
The five inflections Prinsep presumed – correctly – to correspond with the five basic vowel sounds ‘a’, ‘e’, ‘i’, ‘o’, ‘u’ found in Sanskrit and other Indo-European root languages. After drawing up a chart showing all the radical letters with their inflections he found that twenty-nine radical characters were employed – less than in modern languages based on Sanskrit, but what might be expected if this was an early form. He went on to highlight one particular group of fifteen characters, which he observed recurring in identical form at the beginning of almost every section or paragraph of text.
Prinsep’s conviction that this group of fifteen characters would prove to be the keystone of ‘No. 1’ grew all the stronger when he retrieved Brian Hodgson’s eye-copy of the Mattiah Lat inscription, where each section also began with that same group of fifteen letters. But then as he examined the three sets of facsimiles from Allahabad, Delhi and Bihar side by side he made an even more astounding discovery – ‘namely, that all three inscriptions are identically the same. Thus the whole of the Bettiah inscription is contained verbatim in that of Feroz’s Lath, published in four consecutive plates in the seventh volume of the Asiatick Researches [Captain Hoare’s eye-copies]; and all that remains of the Allahabad inscription can with equal facility be traced in the same plates.’23 The italics are Prinsep’s.
Prinsep went on to speculate on the implications of this discovery: ‘Whether they mark the conquests of some victorious raja; whether they are as it were the boundary pillars of his dominions; or whether they are of a religious nature, bearing some important text from the sacred volumes of the Bauddhists or Brahmins, can only be satisfactorily solved by the discovery of the language.’
The publication of Hodgson’s letter and Prinsep’s response in the October 1834 issue of the JASB caused a flurry of excitement among its readers, an excitement intensified when an eye-copy made by Hodgson of the inscription on another of the North Bihar columns (today known as the Lauriya-Araraj pillar)24 was shown by Prinsep also to be identical to the other three sets: ‘So we are now in the possession of four copies of the same inscription, three of them perfect, viz. the Delhi, the Matthiah, and the present one, and that of Allahabad mutilated.’25
These revelations led Prinsep to cast around for more examples of No. 1 text. He reprinted in the JRAS Captain Edward Fell’s account of a visit to the Great Tope at Sanchi, originally published in the Calcutta Journal back in 1819, together with an appeal for more drawings from Sanchi and, more importantly, copies of its inscriptions.26
It was precisely at this point that George Turnour joined the debate from his distant outpost in Ceylon. What prompted him to resume his work on the island’s Great Dynastic Chronicle is not known, but after some months of reflection he submitted to James Prinsep in Calcutta a short article on the importance of the Great Dynastic Chronicle as an accurate account of early Buddhism. It meant so little to James Prinsep that he unwittingly forwarded it to his former mentor Professor H. H. Wilson in Oxford for comments. Prinsep then added these comments as highly critical footnotes to Turnour’s article when it appeared in the JASB in September 1836.27
Wilson had been one of the sponsors of the two volumes of The Mahavansi, the Raja-Ratnacari and the Raja-vali, forming the Sacred and Historical Books of Ceylon, as translated by the Reverend William Fox. He had no time for Turnour’s central argument, which was that the Great Dynastic Chronicle demonstrated the major role played by the Mauryan king Ashoka in the development of Buddhism, both in India and beyond India’s borders, after himself converting to Buddhism. This was nonsense, declared Wilson. It was well known that Ashoka was a worshipper of Shiva, and besides, ‘the faith of Asoka is a matter of very little moment, as the prince himself is possibly an ideal personage’. Furthermore, the Great Dynastic Chronicle was a thoroughly unreliable document when compared to Brahmanical texts such as the Puranas and the poet Kalhana’s chronicle of the kings of Kashmir, the River of Kings.
This very public rebuke did not go down well with Turnour. He appealed to the Asiatic Society of Bengal for its support in the publication of his translation of the first twenty chapters of the Great Dynastic Chronicle. Probably because of his own close ties with Wilson, Prinsep passed this appeal on to the Reverend William Mill, the Asiatic Society’s Vice-President – a wise move as it turned out, for despite being a Unitarian and principal of Calcutta’s newly established Bishop’s College, Mill was a Sanskritist and a genuine scholar in his own right.
Mill’s reading of Turnour’s manuscript left him astonished and in no doubt that the Great Dynastic Chronicle was, as Turnour claimed, a work of great antiquity and of huge importance as a source document. Not only did it pre-date the Puranas by some centuries but it showed every sign of being a far more authentic chronicle of events. Despite the Great Dynastic Chronicle’s focus on Ceylon, Mill declared it to be the most valuable historical source yet known relating to the history of India prior to the Muslim invasions. Furthermore, it highlighted ‘the peculiarly interesting connection between the history of Ceylon before the Christian era, with that of Magadha’ – a connection that extended to the language in which the Great Dynastic Chronicle had been written.28
That language was Pali, which Turnour had shown to be ‘no other than the Magadha Prakrit – the classical form in ancient Bihar’. It appeared that Pali and Sanskrit were both derived from the same source: Magadhan Prakrit.
The Reverend Mill’s unequivocal support for Turnour led to a meeting of the Asiatic Society of Bengal held in Calcutta on 4 January 1836, at which those present disregarded the advice of Professor Wilson and voted ‘to advocate the patronage by the Government of India of Mr Turnour’s intended publication’. That funding enabled George Turnour’s Epitome of the History of Ceylon, Compiled from Native Annals: and the First Twenty Chapters of the Mahawanso to be published by the Cotta Church Mission Press in Ceylon later in that same year, complete with an introduction in which its author comprehensively demolished many of the claims made by Wilson and others in their studies of early Indian history.29
Turnour was able to show that the Great Dynastic Chronicle’s early source, the Dipavamsa or ‘Island Chronicle’, contained the oldest account yet known of the life of Gautama Sakyamuni Buddha and the subsequent development of the Buddhist community in India and Ceylon over some seven centuries. Here was a very different slant on historical events hitherto seen only from the perspective of Brahman writers – and one that directly challenged their version of Indian history.
The Great Dynastic Chronicle was, first and foremost, a history of the Buddhist Church on the island of Lanka but it included events on the mainland from the time of the Buddha, helpfully backed up with a twin dating system: one based on years since the death of Sakyamuni Buddha, the other on years since the accession of the ruling monarch. Thus, the Sakyamuni’s death – year zero in the Buddhist calendar – had taken place in the eighth year of the reign of King Ajatasatru of Magadha. Exactly a century after the Buddha’s death the Second Buddhist Council had taken place, that being the tenth year of the reign of King Kalasoko, whose ten sons had ruled for twenty-two years before giving way to the nine Nanda brothers, the last of which was Dhana Nanda, overthrown by the Brahman minister Chanakya.
‘Having put him to death,’ wrote Turnour in his translation –
Chanako installed in the sovereignty over the whole of Jambudipo
[India], a descendant of the dynasty of Moriyan sovereigns, endowed with illustrious and beneficent attributes, named Chandragutto. He reigned thirty-four years. His son Bindusara reigned twenty-eight years. The sons of Bindusara were one hundred and one, the issue of different mothers. Among them, Asoko [the Pali form of the Sanskrit Ashoka, rendered as Ashoka from here on to avoid confusion] by his piety and supernatural wisdom, became all-powerful. He having put to death one hundred brothers, minus one, born of different mothers, reigned sole sovereign of all Jambudipo. Be it known, that from the period of the death of Buddho, and antecedent to his installation, two hundred and eighteen years had elapsed.
In other words, Ashoka had been anointed king of Magadha 218 years after the death of Sakyamuni Buddha.
Turnour’s translation went on to give details of King Ashoka’s rise to power. Due to a rumour that he is destined to murder his father and take the throne for himself, Ashoka is sent away to govern the kingdom of Avanti, with its capital city at Ujjain. On his way there Ashoka halts at Vidisha and meets a ‘lovely maiden named Devi, the daughter of a merchant. He made her his wife, and she was (afterwards) with child by him and bore in Ujjeni a beautiful boy, Mahindo [Mahinda in Sanskrit, and in that form hereafter], and when two years had passed she bore a daughter, Samghamitta [Sanghamitta in Sanskrit, and in that form hereafter].’30
A decade later, while acting as his father’s viceroy in Ujjain, Ashoka receives news that King Bindusara is dying. He hastens to Pataliputra and immediately on arrival presents himself at his father’s deathbed: ‘As soon as his sire expired, seizing the capital for himself, and putting to death his eldest brother in that celebrated city, he usurped the sovereignty.’31
Four years pass before Ashoka’s position as ruler of Magadha is strong enough to allow his official anointing as king to take place. He appoints his younger brother Tisso (Tissa in Sanskrit, and in that form hereafter), born of the same mother, as his deputy. However, Ashoka’s violent conduct earns him the epithet Candasoka or ‘Angry Ashoka’. He then begins to have religious doubts. His father King Bindusara had been ‘of the Brahmanical faith’ and had supported sixty thousand Brahmans with alms, a practice which Ashoka follows for three years until the ‘despicable’ behaviour of the Brahmans at court leads him to order representatives from all religions to come before him separately so that he can question them about their tenets. While this examination is in progress his eye is caught by the calm bearing of a young Buddhist monk passing under his window. The boy’s name is Nigrodha, and he turns out to be the orphaned son of Ashoka’s eldest half-brother Sumana, whom Ashoka killed in his rise to power. Sitting Nigrodha on his throne, Ashoka questions him on matters of Buddhist doctrine until he is satisfied that this is the true faith – ‘and when the lord of the earth had heard him he was won to the doctrine of the Conqueror [i.e. Sakyamuni Buddha]’.32
Ashoka now becomes an upasaka or ‘lay Buddhist’, the Brahmans are expelled from court and sixty thousand Buddhist monks take their place. The leading elder of the age, Moggaliputta Tissa (Tissa son of Moggali), becomes King Ashoka’s teacher and remains the dominant figure in Ashoka’s life until his death in the twenty-sixth year of Ashoka’s reign.
Having learned that there are eighty-four thousand discourses on the tenets of Buddhism, King Ashoka orders stupas and monastic institutions to be built in eighty-four thousand places. Outside his capital of Pataliputra he builds the Ashokarama, a major monastic complex bearing his name. The building of these monasteries takes three years and to celebrate their completion Ashoka holds a great festival, bestowing lavish gifts upon the Buddhist Church. On the day of the festival itself he proceeds in state to visit his Ashokarama and is proclaimed Dhammasoko – in Sanskrit Dharmashoka, or ‘Ashoka of the Moral Law’:
On that day the great king wearing all his adornments with the women of his household, with his ministers and surrounded by the multitude of his troops, went to his own arama, as if cleaving the earth. In the midst of the brotherhood he stood, bowing down to the venerable brotherhood. In the assembly were eighty kotis [millions] of bhikkhus [monks], and … ninety times one hundred thousand bhikkhunis [nuns] … These monks and nuns wrought the miracle called the ‘unveiling of the world’ to the end that the king Dharmashoka might be converted. Candashoka was he called in earlier times, by reason of his evil deeds; he was known as Dharmashoka afterwards because of his pious deeds.33
The elder Moggaliputta Tissa acknowledges the king’s great generosity towards the Buddhist Sangha but explains that a greater means of gaining merit would be to allow his two children Mahinda and Sanghamitta to enter the Buddhist order. Mahinda is then aged twenty and his sister eighteen. Their ordination takes places in King Dharmashoka’s sixth year following his consecration. Dharmashoka’s younger brother Tissa then seeks permission to become a monk, which is reluctantly given.
The fortunes of the Buddhists now improve greatly, thanks to the generosity of Dharmashoka. But this success attracts ‘heretics’ who bring their own false doctrines, leading to great confusion within the Buddhist community and causing Moggaliputta Tissa to describe them as a ‘dreadful excrescence on religion, like unto a boil’. These schisms continue for seven years and eventually force the king to act. However, his teacher had gone into a seven-year solitary retreat in the Himalaya, so King Dharmashoka sends one of his ministers to the Ashokarama with orders to settle a particular dispute, resulting in an incident in which a number of monks are killed.
Greatly distressed, King Dharmashoka sends for Moggaliputta Tissa, who finally breaks his retreat when the king despatches a ship up the Ganges to collect him. Ashoka then summons the whole of the Buddhist priesthood to assemble for a special convocation beside the Ashokarama. Each monk expounds the doctrines according to his school, after which sixty thousand are expelled as heretics. Under the direction of Moggaliputta Tissa the remaining Buddhists succeed in making ‘a true compilation of the true dharma’.34 This important event – afterwards known as the Third Buddhist Council – lasts nine months and ends in the seventeenth year of Dharmashoka’s reign.
Meanwhile, in ‘the celebrated capital Anuradhapura, in the delightful Lanka’, the Lankan king Mutasiwo has died after a reign of sixty years. His second son becomes king and takes the name Dewananpiatisso or ‘Tisso Beloved-of-the-Gods’ (Devanamapiyatissa in Sanskrit, and in that form hereafter). He decides that no one is more worthy to receive a gift of such jewels than his friend King Dharmashoka. To escort the jewels he sends his nephew Maha Aritto, who journeys for seven days by sea and then another seven days by land to reach Pataliputra and present the gifts to King Dharmashoka. The Magadhan king responds with gifts of his own that include sacred water from the Ganges, ‘a royal virgin of great personal charms’ and ‘one hundred and sixty loads of hill paddy [rice] which had been brought by parrots’.
Along with these material presents Dharmashoka sends the gift of ‘pious advice’ in the form of the following words: ‘I have taken refuge in Buddho, his religion, and his priesthood: I have avowed myself a devotee in the religion of the descendant of Sakyo. Ruler of men, imbuing thy mind with the conviction of the truth of these supreme blessings, with unfeigned faith, do thou also take refuge in this salvation.’
This first religious contact between the two monarchs is followed by a far more ambitious missionary project, attributed in the Great Dynastic Chronicle not to Ashoka but to his religious teacher Moggaliputta Tissa, who sends missionaries to every corner of the Indian subcontinent and beyond. This includes a deputation of five elders, led by King Dharmashoka’s son Mahinda, who are despatched south with the instruction, ‘Establish ye in the delightful land of Lanka, the delightful religion of the Vanquisher [i.e. Sakyamuni Buddha].’
Understandably, the Great Dynastic Chronicle devotes a great deal of space to Mahinda’s mission to Lanka, which takes place when Mahinda has been a monk for twelve years. Before he leaves for Lanka, Mahinda goes to Vidisha to say goodbye to his mother, his party now inc
luding his sister Sanghamitta’s son, Sumano. His mother Devi is described as living in a monastery at Chetiyagiri, or ‘the Hill of the Stupa’, and being overjoyed at seeing her beloved son.
After a month at his mother’s monastery on the Hill of the Stupa, Mahinda and his party depart for Lanka – not by land and sea but by air, alighting on a mountain peak in the centre of the island. King Devanamapiyatissa of Lanka receives the missionaries at Mihintale and is converted to Buddhism, along with his family and his court. Several chapters later Sumano is asked to return to Pataliputra to beg his great-uncle King Dharmashoka for relics of the Buddha. Sumano returns to Magadha to find Dharmashoka engaged in worshipping the Bodhi tree at Bodhgaya. Having received the Buddha’s alms bowl from him, Sumano proceeds to the Himalayas to collect two further Buddha relics: a collarbone and an eye-tooth. These precious relics are transported to Lanka and interred by King Devanamapiyatissa in a great stupa built for that purpose at Anuradhapura.
King Devanamapiyatissa’s next request is for a cutting from the sacred Bodhi tree, which is communicated to Dharmashoka by his daughter Sanghamitta, now a female elder of the new Buddhist Church in Lanka. The king is greatly troubled as to how this can be done without harming the tree but performs a complex ceremony that ends with his taking a cutting from the Bo tree, potting it and placing it on board a sea-going vessel under Sanghamitta’s care. The boat then sails down the Ganges to the sea while the king and his army march across the land for seven days before meeting up with the boat at the port of Tamalitta (Tamralipti in modern Bengal). Here a final ceremony is held before the king wades into the sea up to his neck to place the cutting on board and bid it farewell: ‘The maharaja having thus spoken, stood on the shore of the ocean with uplifted hands; and, gazing on the departing bo-branch, shed tears in the bitterness of his grief. In the agony of parting with the bo-branch, the disconsolate Dharmashoka, weeping and lamenting in loud sobs, departed for his own capital.’35
Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor Page 13