Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor
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Ashoka goes to war against his half-brothers and destroys them all to become ruler of ‘the whole territory from the Himalaya to the Vindhya’. He grows ever more haughty and cruel, only finding peace of mind when performing violent deeds, so acquiring the name ‘Ashoka the Wrathful’. Then a Buddhist novice who is a disciple of the elder Yashah enters Ashoka’s torture house by mistake and, just as related in the Legend of King Ashoka, survives his ordeal unscathed. Yashah then converts Ashoka, who thereafter ‘was full of great reverence and started spending the day and night in pious acts’.
Yashah invites all the Buddhist monks to Pataliputra for a religious festival, for which the king builds a very large hall. Sixty thousand monks attend the festival, which lasts three months. He then embarks on a second round of conquest to bring ‘under his rule without bloodshed all the countries including those to the south of the Vindhya … the northern Himalayas, the snowy ranges beyond Li-yul [Khotan, thus the Tien Shan mountains], the entire land of Jambudvipa bounded on seas on east, south and west, and also fifty small islands.’
Ashoka then follows the advice of Yashah to collect relics of the Buddha and disperse these in eighty-four thousand stupas throughout his empire ‘as far as Li-yul in the north’. Taranatha goes on to recount the story of the blinding of Ashoka’s favourite son Kunala, but with significant differences from the version found in the Legend of King Ashoka, in that here Kunala is rendered unfit to rule by his blindness and becomes a monk. ‘That is why,’ adds Taranatha, ‘though it was his turn to be king, his son Vigatashoka was placed on the throne.’
In Taranatha’s History Ashoka’s end follows much the same general course given in the Legend of King Ashoka, although he adds a curious detail concerning Ashoka’s last moments. A female attendant who is fanning him falls asleep in the midday heat and drops her yak-tail whisk on his body, angering the dying Ashoka: ‘The king thought, “Previously even great kings used to wash my feet. Even the lowest of my servants is insulting me now in this way.” Thus he died with anger in mind. Because of this anger, he had to be reborn as a Naga [snake king] in a big lake of Pataliputra.’
Unlike the Legend of King Ashoka, Taranatha’s History contains a brief reference to a link with Lanka, although here the arrival of Buddhism in Lanka owes nothing to Ashoka and everything to an elder named Krishna, who comes to the island at the request of its king, Asana-Simha-Kosa: ‘He preached the Doctrine for three months in that island, filled it with monasteries and sanghas and led many people to the “four stages of perfection”.’ According to Taranatha, this Krishna was succeeded by Sudarshana, who died some years before Ashoka’s reign, suggesting that the arrival of Buddhism in Lanka began during Chandragupta’s reign rather than Ashoka’s – a view shared by some modern historians.
Taranatha lists as the successors to Ashoka his grandson Vigatashoka and his great-grandson Virasena. He tells us that Virasena acquired a vast amount of treasure by propitiating the Hindu goddess of wealth, Lakshmi, suggesting that his loyalties had switched from Buddhism. But he then adds that Virasena ‘entertained for three years the monks all around and worshipped at all the caityas in the world with a hundred items of offerings for each’. Perhaps Virasena was doing no more than following Ashoka’s doctrine of respecting all religions.
To further confuse matters, Taranatha then introduces a second line of kings he calls the Candras,8 named after its founder, Candragupta: patently, Chandragupta Maurya. Chandragupta is succeeded by Bindusara, who is followed by Shricandra – perhaps Bindusara’s eldest son Sushima – who is followed by Dharmacandra – presumably Ashoka as Dharma Ashoka. Then come eleven names all ending in ‘candra’ not found in any other genealogical table, the last three said by Taranatha to have been ‘very powerful and had reverence for the Three Jewels [Buddhism]’. Taranatha then concludes: ‘Soon after Nemacandra ruled the kingdom Brahmana Pusyamitra, the royal priest, revolted against the king and assumed power.’ This is, of course, the Brahman Pushyamitra named in the Puranas and in the Legend of King Ashoka as the army commander who overthrows the last of the Mauryas to found the Shunga dynasty.
Despite the efforts of Vasili Vasiliev, much of the detail contained in Taranatha’s History of Buddhism in India remained unknown outside Russia and Germany until well into the twentieth century. And despite the scholarship of Eugène Burnouf and Stanislas Julien in France, the Legend of King Ashoka was similarly neglected. Indeed, the first English translation of the latter – by Professor John Strong (whose translations have been quoted above) – only appeared in print in 1983.
But for what we must now call the last of the Orientalists and the first of the Indologists, archaeologists, philologists and epigraphists working in India, these omissions scarcely mattered. They were preoccupied with two quite different texts.
The first to appear was Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat’s Foé Koué Ki, ou Relations des Royaumes Bouddhiques (‘Records of Buddhist Kingdoms’), his translation into French of the Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Faxian’s account of his pilgrimage across India at the start of the fifth century CE, published in 1836.9 The second was Histoire de la vie de Hiouen-tsang et de ses voyages dans I’lnde depuis I’an 629 jusqu’en 645 (‘History of the Life of Hiouen-tsang and his Travels in India Between the Years 629 and 645’), published in 1853 – this second work being Stanislas Julien’s translation into French of the travels of Faxian’s more famous and later compatriot Xuanzang.10
The publication in France of these two eyewitness accounts of India in the fifth and seventh centuries caused no great stir across the other side of English Channel – except among a handful of Indologists who recognised in them a means of rediscovering India’s lost Buddhist landscape. In India James Prinsep welcomed the news of the publication of the French translation of Faxian’s travels, finally published in Paris after years of delay – but wondered if he would ever see it. ‘Alas!’ he lamented, ‘When shall we in India have the opportunity of seeing these works at any tolerable period after their publication?’
Even before that statement appeared in print Prinsep had become fatally incapacitated. With his departure and death, it fell to the most devoted of his disciples to take up the challenge. One was Captain Markham Kittoe, discoverer of the Dhauli Rock Edicts – a fine upstanding figure of a man with an unfortunate tendency to upset authority. The other was the military engineer who had assisted Prinsep in his studies of Indian coinage: Captain Alexander Cunningham – short, balding and tending towards plumpness, but as solid as a rock.
10
Records of the Western Regions
The Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang, greatest of all the pilgrim-travellers to India, as portrayed in a ninth-century wall painting in the Mogao Caves, Dunhuang. (Wikimedia PD-Art).
In August 1966 China’s Cultural Revolution entered its most violent phase. Groups of young men and women in the green uniform of the Red Guards rampaged through town and countryside targeting one or other of the ‘Four Olds’ – old customs, old culture, old habits, old ideas – that the Great Helmsman Mao had declared to be the targets of the Cultural Revolution. In the suburbs of Xian in China’s Shanxi province one such group stormed that city’s most beloved building: the ancient seven-storied Dayan Ta, or Wild Goose Pagoda. Shouting ‘Smash the old world, build a brand-new world’,1 they broke down the doors, pushed aside the monks and began to tie ropes round the heads of the Buddha and Bodhisattva statues in the shrine hall in order to pull them to the ground. At this point a cadre from the State Cultural Relics Bureau arrived with a certificate declaring the statues and the pagoda itself to be national treasures and not to be touched.
But there was no such prohibition order on the Wild Goose Pagoda’s most precious treasures: its collection of Buddhist sutras, or canonical texts, some of which dated to the construction of the pagoda in the sixth century, and a few of which even pre-dated it. These were gathered into a pyre in the courtyard outside and set alight. The bonfire continued to burn throughout the night.
Faxian was not the first Chinese Buddhist pilgrim to visit India but he was the first whose account of his travels survived to become widely read, appearing under the title of Foguo-ji, or A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms. He was also fortunate in making his journey at a time when Buddhism in China had just won its first royal convert.
After following the upper course of the Indus through the Pamirs with great difficulty, Faxian arrived at the Buddhist kingdom of Woo-chang, or the ‘Garden Country’ (Mahabun, today Swat, northern Pakistan), in the spring of 402 CE, finding it to be a Buddhist demi-paradise where ‘the Law of Buddha is very flourishing’.2 In the autumn Faxian moved on to the plains country of Gandhara, noting that here, too, the population was still largely Buddhist, even if mostly Hinayana, with monks and monasteries in abundance.
Also much in evidence throughout Gandhara were the memorial mounds containing relics of Buddhist saints known as stupas. At the city of Purushpura (today Peshawar) Faxian was pleased to see two vast stupas built by the Kushan king Kanishka, one housing the alms bowl of Sakyamuni Buddha, brought back from India by the Kushans as war booty.
But King Kanishka was not the only monarch to have supported Buddhism and to have built stupas. Long before the invasion of the Kushans a far more powerful monarch had set the example that King Kanishka had merely followed. This great king was known to the Chinese as Wuyou Wang, or ‘The King Not Feeling Sorrow’. It was King Wuyou who had caused the blessings of the Dharma to be brought to China and his name was celebrated and revered throughout the Middle Kingdom as a Chakravartin, or ‘Wheel-turning Monarch’.3
King Wuyou was a name that Faxian was to encounter many times on his Indian travels, making its first appearance as he crossed the mountains dividing the Garden Country from the plains, described in his account as ‘the place where Dharmavivardhana, the son of Wuyou Wang, ruled’.4 From this point on Faxian’s references to King Wuyou were nearly always in the context of stupas that were said to have been built by this greatest of all stupa builders.
After six months in Gandhara three of Faxian’s companions returned to China. He and the other remaining pilgrims then journeyed across the Punjab to the city of Mataoulu (Mathura), at that time under the rule of Indian kings described by Faxian as firm believers in the Dharma. They were not themselves Buddhists but showed great respect to the Buddhist monastic community by making offerings to the monks, removing their headgear in their presence and offering them food ‘with their own hands’.
Faxian’s years in India coincided with the rule of the greatest of the Gupta rulers: Raja Vikramaditya, or ‘Sun of Power’, also known – somewhat confusingly in the context of this book – as Chandragupta, the ‘Moon-Protected’, but generally known to later historians as Chandragupta II so as to avoid confusing him with Chandragupta Maurya. The Guptas had grown in strength as the Kushans declined, and by Faxian’s time they controlled a large empire extending from the mouth of the Indus to the mouth of the Ganges. Despite being listed in Brahmanical texts as a devout follower of the Hindu god Vishnu, Chandragupta II patronised all forms of religious expression, only taking a dogmatic line when it came to matters of caste.
Faxian spent the summer of 404 CE at Sankisa, which he knew of as the place where Sakyamuni Buddha had descended by a triple ladder from the heavenly realms after giving Buddhist teachings to his dead mother.
Sakyamuni Buddha descending to earth at Sankisa, as shown on a second-century BCE bas-relief. The Buddha is represented only by symbols. His footprints can be seen at the top and bottom of the ladder. (Cunningham, The Stupa of Bharhut, 1879)
In his Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms Faxian reports that here at Sankisa the great monarch King Wuyou had long ago built a monastery ‘with a standing image, sixteen cubits in height, right over the middle flight [of the ladder]. Behind the monastery he had erected a stone pillar, about fifty cubits high, with a lion on the top of it.’5 This is the earliest known reference to a stone column attributed to the emperor Ashoka – for Wuyou, ‘Without Feeling Sorrow’, is, of course, a Chinese rendering of the Sanskrit ashoka, ‘without sorrow’.
Faxian then journeyed east to visit a number of sites associated with the life, death and teachings of Sakyamuni Buddha. These included the four most sacred sites of Buddhism: Lumbini, where Prince Sidhhartha Sakya was born; Bodhgaya, where he achieved enlightenment to become the Buddha, or ‘Awakened One’; the ‘Deer Park’ of Sarnath, where he preached the first sermon known as the Dharmachakra-pravartana, or ‘Turning of the Wheel of the Moral Law’; and Kushinagara, where he achieved his Great Final Extinguishing, with his death. After reaching the first of these auspicious sites Faxian travelled south to cross the Ganges at a point he describes as ‘the confluence of the five rivers’, just upstream of the capital of the country of Magadha: Pataliputra, the ‘city of flowers’.
This, Faxian notes, was the very city from which King Wuyou had ruled India. Indeed, his palace and his halls were still to be seen, and his towering city walls and gates still stood, all inlaid with sculpture-work carved ‘in a way which no human hands of this world could accomplish’, leading Faxian to declare that this was the work of spirits working to King Wuyou’s command. Indeed, Pataliputra and its surrounds contained an abundance of sites directly associated with the name of Wuyou Wang. One was a large artificial hill within the city itself, which the king had had specially built for his younger brother, who had wished to find solitude as a Buddhist monk. Another was a large stupa situated just outside the city; one of the original eight stupas that had been raised over the divided remains of Sakyamuni Buddha following his cremation, only to be reopened by King Wuyou as part of his redistribution of the relics throughout the land. The Buddha stupa at Pataliputra was the first of these to be disturbed. Beside it Faxian saw two stone columns ascribed to King Wuyou, the first ‘fourteen or fifteen cubits in circumference, and more than thirty cubits high, on which there is an inscription saying, “Wuyou-Wang gave the Jambudvipa [the southern continent, India] to the general body of the monks, and then redeemed it from them with money. This he did three times”.’ The second pillar was of similar height but with a carved lion for a capital. Here the inscription recorded King Wuyou’s building of a town and the day, month and year in which it had been built.
Beside King Wuyou’s relic stupa was a Mahayana monastery where Faxian studied for three years, learning Sanskrit and copying a number of sutras to take back to China. During this period he also visited the nearby city of Rajagriha, closely associated with the life of the Buddha, as well as the Buddhist ‘holy of holies’ of Bodhgaya and its Bodhi tree.
At this point in his narrative Faxian adds a chapter devoted to the history of Wuyou Wang very much as set out in the Divine Stories, beginning with the story of how as a small boy in a previous existence Wuyou Wang had met an earlier incarnation of the Buddha and had made him an offering of earth for his begging bowl, as a result of which he ‘received the recompense of becoming a king of the iron wheel, to rule over Jambudvipa’.
The significance of the iron wheel lay in the Buddhist belief that when a Chakravartin or ‘Wheel-turning Monarch’, ascended the throne, he received from heaven a chakra or wheel, made of gold, silver, copper or iron, its material indicating the length and quality of his reign. King Wuyou, therefore, was a Wheel-turning Monarch, but of the lowest of the three levels, being less than perfect.6
In the year 407 CE Faxian began his return journey to China, but by slow stages that occupied another four years, including two spent on the island of Singhala, or the ‘Lion Kingdom’ (now Sri Lanka). Faxian’s departure from India coincided with the arrival of a new group of Central Asian nomads on India’s north-west borders, a people known to the Chinese as the Ye-tai or Hoa – the latter form afterwards reaching Europe as the Huns and India as the Huna. By 410 CE the first wave of these Huns had settled in Bactria and Gandhara, only to be moved on by a second wave of Huns, known to the Indians as the Sveta Huna, or ‘White Huns’. By the end of the fifth century the White Huns had driven the Gupta rulers of northern India back to their core territories in the mid-Gangetic plains.
In Persia the twentieth Sassanid emperor, the celebrated Khosrau (Chosroes), joined forces with a confederation of nomadic tribes to disperse the White Huns. However, within eastern Gandhara and northern India, isolated pockets of Huns clung on, competing with other nomadic migrants from Central Asia to establish their own petty kingdoms. They adopted the local culture, accepted the religious authority of the Brahmans and, after undergoing various purification rites, emerged as self-proclaimed Rajputs, or ‘sons of kings’, and as fully paid-up Kshatriyas of the warrior caste. The most powerful of these new Rajput clans rose to power under the leadership of Raja Harshavardana, ‘Harsha the Great’, who established himself at Kannauj on the Ganges in the early years of the sixth century and ruled over the Gangetic plains for some forty years.