Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor
Page 19
Harsha the Great’s rise to power coincided with the unification of Arabia under the leadership of the Prophet Muhammad, the start of the Tang dynasty in China, and – on a more humble level – the formation of the Anglo-Saxon petty kingdoms in Britain.
It was during this brief moment of clarity in an otherwise confused period of India’s history that a second Chinese monk set out on what was to become the most fruitful journey ever undertaken by a Buddhist pilgrim. Born in eastern China in 602, Xuanzang was ordained as Buddhist monk at the age of twenty at a time when Buddhism in China was experiencing a golden age thanks to the enthusiastic patronage of a succession of emperors, one of whom – Emperor Wu-di of the Liang dynasty (502–49) – consciously modelled himself on the Indian emperor Wuyou Wang and embarked on an extravagant temple-building programme of his own.
Thanks in part to the accounts of Faxian, India had now assumed almost mythical status in China as a ‘Western Paradise’ where great Wheel-turners such as King Wuyou and King Kanishka had ruled as Dharmarajas, or ‘Dharma-promoting rulers’. It was this vision of India as the only true source of Buddhist truth that inspired Xuanzang to make his own journey in search of Buddhist sutras. The emperor Taizong, founder of the Tang dynasty, had imposed a ban on foreign travel. Defying the imperial edict, Xuanzang set out for India in the year 629. According to his biographer, he was a tall, handsome man with beautiful eyes and a good complexion, stately in manner, serious expression and zealous in the pursuit of learning.
Following a more northerly route than that taken by his predecessor, Xuanzang crossed the Tien Shan mountains to enter what are now the Central Asian khanates, then dominated by the hostile Gokturks. Crossing the Amur Darya river into less hostile Sassanid territory, he encountered scattered communities of Buddhist monks who had survived the depredations of the Huns. These communities extended as far west as Kangguo (Samarkand), Anguo (Bokhara) and Talaquan (Balkh in western Afghanistan), where Xuanzang paused to study Buddhist scriptures and to collect the first of what became a hugely important collection of Buddhist texts. Xuanzang then picked up Faxian’s trail to visit the Buddhist community at Bamiyan, where he admired the two great standing images of Buddha and noted the presence of ‘several tens of monasteries with several thousand monks’,7 before moving on to the Gandharan summer capital of Kapisha (Begram), even then governed by a Buddhist king: ‘He loves and nurtures his subjects and venerates the Triple Gem [Triratna, comprising the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha or Buddhist Church].’ From Kapisha the Chinese monk crossed ‘steep and precipitous’ mountains to enter eastern Gandhara and the territory of India.
At this point in his account of his Indian travels Xuanzang breaks off to give a detailed description of the people of India and their customs, this information being added after Xuanzang’s return to China by order of Emperor Taizong. In his desire to please his emperor, Xuanzang did his best to match his imagined India with the reality, fudging the details whenever these conflicted with the imperial vision. But nothing could entirely conceal the fact that what Xuanzang found in India was Buddhism in decline and Brahmanism very much in the ascendant. Purushpura, winter capital of Gandhara, had been a thriving centre of Buddhism in Faxian’s time, and was now all but abandoned, its great Buddhist monuments in ruins. Only the foundations remained of the famous building that had once housed King Kanishka’s most prized Buddhist trophy, the Buddha’s alms bowl. The bowl itself had been carried off to Persia.
From Purushpura Xuanzang travelled north over the Malakand mountain range to enter the Garden Country. Here, too, everything lay in ruins: ‘Along the two sides of the Subavastu River [Swat River] there were formerly one thousand four hundred monasteries, but most of them are now in desolation.’ Moving east, Xuanzang came to the great mountain of Mo-ha-fa-na, a Chinese rendering of the Sanskrit Mahavana, or ‘Great Forest’, later Mahaban. Here he venerated a stupa built by King Wuyou to mark the spot where the Buddha in a previous life had cut a slice of flesh from his body in order to ransom a dove from a hawk.
This is the first mention of Wuyou Wang in Xuanzang’s account and from this point onwards his references to the great Indian emperor become ever more frequent. King Wuyou, Xuanzang seems to imply, is still a force to be reckoned with, even though his memorials are often to be found surrounded by scenes of desolation and neglect. To reinforce the point, the Chinese pilgrim adds further detail in the form of tales about King Wuyou, drawing on a number of historical sources that would remain unknown to the Western world for centuries to come – as indeed would Xuanzang’s and Faxian’s own accounts.
After crossing the Indus Xuanzang came to the once great city of Taxila. Here, too, it was the same story of ruination. In the city’s surrounds was a number of stupas attributed by Xuanzang to King Wuyou, including one to the south-east of the city built by him ‘at the place where his son, Prince Kunala, had his eyes torn out’. Here Xuanzang takes time out to relate the story of Kunala’s blinding at the instigation of his wicked stepmother.
From Taxila Xuanzang moved on to Kashmir to be the guest of its Buddhist ruler. Here, too, the continuing influence of Wuyou Wang is reported in the form of stupas raised and monasteries founded by him, allowing Xuanzang to discourse further on this great ‘King Wuyou of Magadha’, who ‘fostered all creatures of the four forms of birth’. He goes on to tell the curious story of how Wuyou Wang orders five hundred monks who have accepted the heterodox teachings of a Buddhist elder to be drowned in the Ganges. They flee to Kashmir, and when they refuse to return, the king comes in person to apologise for their persecution and causes five hundred monasteries to be built in Kashmir.
After three years spent studying the scriptures in the Himalayas, Xuanzang continued his pilgrimage across the upper Gangetic plains. Everywhere he encountered further evidence of the decline of Buddhism, although his hopes were raised when he reached the country of Kapitha, which in Faxian’s time had been known as Sankisa – the scene of the celebrated event in the life of Sakyamuni Buddha when he had returned to earth from heaven by way of a divinely constructed ladder. By the time Xuanzang reached this spot the stairway seen by Faxian had disappeared. ‘However, King Wuyou’s stone column topped by a lion was still standing’ and was reckoned by Xuanzang to be seventy feet high: ‘Being dark purple in colour, it is made of a lustrous hard stone with a fine grain, and on its top is a carved lion crouching and facing towards the stairs. On the surface all round the pillar there are engraved various kinds of strange figures.’
The Chinese pilgrim had now arrived at the borders of the most powerful kingdom in India, ruled over by the mighty monarch Harsha the Great. On his arrival at Kannouj in the year 636, Xuanzang was brought before King Harsha and questioned at length about his own country. He subsequently met the king on other occasions and was greatly impressed by his character and the principles upon which he based his rule. To Xuanzang, these principles mirrored those instituted by Wuyou Wang many centuries earlier and were Buddhist in all but name.
And yet, as Xuanzang continued his pilgrimage across what is today Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, the physical evidence of Buddhist decline was undeniable. For all Xuanzang’s descriptions of glorious events of long ago, the monuments and monastic institutions associated with them were for the most part ruined and deserted. Huge tracts of countryside appeared to have been abandoned, even if at almost every stage the Chinese monk came across evidence of the legacy of the Wheel-turning Monarch Wuyou Wang. Outside the deserted city of Sravasti he saw two seventy-foot pillars flanking the eastern gate of Sakyamuni Buddha’s Jetavana monastery: ‘On the top of the left pillar there is carved the wheel sign, and a figure of a bull is engraved on the top of the right one.’ On the outskirts of the abandoned city of Kapilivastu, where Sakyamuni Buddha had spent his early years as Prince Sidhhartha, were two more such pillars, both topped by carved lions and carrying inscriptions. At the Lumbini pool nearby a single column and a stupa marked the spot where the prince had been born, although here
the pillar had been broken in two by a dragon.
Xuanzang noted more of King Wuyou’s stone columns as he made his way southwards across Bihar: one at Kushinagara, where Sakyamuni Buddha entered nirvana, marked by a large stupa and ‘a stone pillar with a record of the Tathagata’s Nirvana inscribed on it’; one at the Cremation Stupa, where Sakyamuni Buddha’s remains were cremated and divided into eight portions; one in Chandu country, surmounted by a lion and inscribed with a record ‘of the event of subduing demons’; one at Vaishali, where one of the eight portions of Sakyamuni’s ashes had been placed in a stupa by a Licchavi king, a pillar ‘fifty or sixty feet tall with the figure of a lion on the top’; and two more pillars outside the city of Varanasi, ‘one on the west side of the Varana River, the other on the east’. The first was ‘as smooth as a mirror’ and stood in front of a hundred-foot-high stupa built by King Wuyou; the other was within the confines of the Deer Park Monastery (Sarnath) where Sakyamuni Buddha had preached his wheel-turning sermon to his first five disciples. ‘Within the great enclosure,’ Xuanzang writes –
there is a temple over two hundred feet high with a gilt amra [mango] fruit carved in relief at the top … To the northeast of the temple is a stone stupa built by King Wuyou.8 Although the foundation has sunk, the remaining trunk is still one hundred feet high. In front of it is erected a stone pillar more than seventy feet tall, which is smooth as jade and as reflective as a mirror. This is the place where the Tathagata [‘one who has found the truth’, thus Sakyamuni Buddha], after having obtained full enlightenment, first turned the Wheel of the Dharma.
An excursion north brought Xuanzang to the country of Nepala (Nepal), where he found the country’s Licchavi ruler to be ‘a pure Buddhist’ and its people a mix of Buddhist and Hindu: ‘the monasteries and deva-temples [Hindu temples] are so close together that they touch each other’. Xuanzang then returned to the Indian plains, and after crossing the Ganges came to Pataliputra – only to find this once mighty city all but abandoned: ‘Of the monasteries, deva-temples and stupas, there are several hundred remnant sites lying in ruins; only two or three remain intact.’
These remains allowed Xuanzang to follow Faxian’s directions and identify the city as it had been in the days of King Wuyou, including the site of his notorious ‘Hell’ prison, now marked by a pillar several tens of feet in height, and the great relic stupa south of the city seen and described by Faxian – which had now sunk on one side so that it resembled an overturned alms bowl. The lustrous stone column was still standing but, notes the Chinese pilgrim, ‘the inscription on it has become incomplete’.
The last royal monument to be visited by Xuanzang at Pataliputra was the remains of the Kukkutarama, the Cock monastery sited to the south-east of the old city, built by King Ashoka soon after his conversion to Buddhism and the scene of the great council attended by a thousand Buddhists, both monks and lay-people. This had also been the scene of King Ashoka’s last days, commemorated by a stupa known as the Amalaka stupa, taking its name from the cherry plum that had been the dying king’s last possession.
Xuanzang’s next point of pilgrimage was Bodhgaya, where he was shocked to find the temple and Bodhi tree all but engulfed by drifting sand dunes. He comments: ‘Some old people said that when the statues of the Bodhsattva disappear and become invisible, the Buddha-dharma will come to an end, and now the statue at the south corner has already sunk down up to the chest.’ He goes on to give details of King Ashoka’s actions not found in the Legend of King Ashoka:
When King Wuyou had just ascended the throne, he believed in heretical doctrines and destroyed the sites left by the Buddha. He sent his troops and went in person to cut the tree. He chopped the roots, stalks, branches, and leaves into small pieces and had them heaped up at a spot a few tens of paces to the west, where fire-worshipping Brahmans were ordered to burn the pile as a sacrifice to their god. But before the smoke and flames had vanished, two trees grew out of the furious fire and luxurious and verdurous leaves.
On seeing this miracle King Wuyou repents, irrigates the remaining roots with milk and makes offerings to the tree so conscientiously that he forgets to go home. But then his queen sets out to finish what her husband failed to complete:
The queen, being a heretical believer, secretly sent a man to fell the tree after nightfall. When King Wuyou went to worship the tree at dawn, he was very sad to see only the stump of the tree. He prayed earnestly and irrigated the stump with sweet milk, and in a few days the tree grew up once again. With deep respect and astonishment, the king built a stone enclosure to the height of more than ten feet around the tree, which is still in existence.
Xuanzang had also to report that the Bodhi tree had once again come under attack, and very recently at that, the assailant being King Sasanka of Bengal, who only recently had murdered King Harsha the Great’s elder brother Raja the Great. Described by Xuanzang as a ‘wicked king and heretical believer’, King Sasanka was a devoted follower of Shiva and an equally ardent enemy of Buddhism. He had set about destroying Buddhist monasteries in Bengal and Bihar, and had made the Bodhi tree at Bodhgaya a special target, first cutting it down and setting fire to it and then digging down to the roots and soaking them in sugarcane juice to prevent them regrowing. ‘Several months later,’ adds Xuanzang, ‘King Purnavarman of Magadha, the last descendant of King Wuyou, heard about the event and said with a sigh of regret, “The Sun of Wisdom has sunk, and only the Buddha’s tree remained in the world; now that the tree has been destroyed, what else is there for living things to see?”’
This King Purnavarman irrigates the remaining roots with milk from several thousand cows and the tree grows ten feet in one night. He then builds a new enclosure round the tree to a height of twenty-four feet. ‘Thus the Bodhi Tree at present is behind the stone wall,’ concludes Xuanzang, ‘with over ten feet of its branches growing out over the wall.’
After his visit to Bodhgaya the Chinese pilgrim began an extended period of study of Buddhist texts that lasted for three years, undertaking it at Nalanda, the greatest centre of learning in the Buddhist world, drawing students from the furthest corners of Asia. According to Xuanzang, all these students were brilliant scholars of high learning, whose virtue was esteemed by their contemporaries and whose reputation was known to foreign lands ‘amounting to several hundreds’. The fruits of centuries of Buddhist thought and philosophy were contained here and at Nalanda’s sister monasteries nearby. It meant that when Xuanzang finally left Magadha in the year 640 he was able to take with him not only a great many Sanskrit works and sutras in manuscript form but a thorough knowledge of the Yogacara or ‘consciousness’ school of Buddhist teaching that through his intervention would spread through China and on to Korea and Japan.
Another three years of travelling passed before Xuanzang finally began to make his way back to China. His return to Xian in Eastern China in the year 645 caused huge excitement and was celebrated throughout much of China. Turning his back on the honours heaped upon him by Emperor Taizong, Xuanzang retired to the newly built Da Chien temple outside Xian to teach and translate. Here he constructed the Wild Goose Pagoda to serve as a library for his Indian sutras and as a translation centre. By the time of Xuanzang’s death in 664, the Wild Goose Pagoda had become the most important centre for the diffusion of Buddhism north of the Himalayas, staffed by fifty translators who had all been taught Sanskrit by the head abbot, Xuanzang. At the emperor’s command, Xuanzang also found time to write what soon became a popular classic of Chinese literature: Da Tang Xiyo Ti or ‘Great Tang Records of the Western Regions’.
Under the strong central government of the Tang dynasty Buddhism continued to flourish in China – a happy state of affairs brought to an abrupt end by the events listed in Chinese Buddhist sources as the ‘Third Catastrophe’: the anti-Buddhist persecutions initiated by the emperor Wu-tsung in 842. In the darker centuries that followed, the persona of the monk Xuanzang underwent a curious transformation by becoming fictionalised as the mo
nk Tripitaka in the much-loved Ming classic novel Xi You Ji, or Journey to the West, better known in more recent centuries as The Monkey King, which in our own time provided the basis for the cult TV series Monkey.
However, the insularity of the Middle Kingdom and the disdain of its rulers for the outside world ensured that Xuanzang’s Great Tang Records of the Western Regions, along with Faxian’s A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms, remained unknown and unread outside China until well into the nineteenth century.
In 1841 tantalising excerpts from the travels in India of both Faxian and Xuanzang began to appear in French academic journals.9 The first to react in India was the late James Prinsep’s protégé Captain Alexander Cunningham. In 1842 he triumphantly demonstrated the accuracy of Faxian’s account by using his directions to locate the ancient Buddhist site of Sankisa, where Sakyamuni Buddha was said to have descended from the Tushita Heaven by a stairway. Faxian had placed Sankisa seven yojanas north-west of Kannauj. This ancient city, situated east of Agra in the Doab country, was still occupied even though it had fallen on hard times, so Cunningham began his search there. He knew that a yojana was a measure of distance used in ancient India to represent a day’s march by a royal army, which he assumed to be about seven miles. After riding out in a north-westerly direction from Kannauj for some fifty miles, Cunningham arrived at the little hamlet of Samkassa. ‘The village’, he afterwards wrote, ‘consists of only fifty or sixty houses, on a high mound which has once been a fort: but all around it for a circuit of six miles there is a succession of high ruined mounds of bricks and earth, which are said to be the walls of the old city.’10
Bolstered by this little coup, Cunningham called on the EICo to appoint an archaeological enquirer, a qualified person ‘to tread in the footsteps of the Chinese pilgrims Hwan Thsang [Xuanzang] and Fa Hian [Faxian]’. His appeal fell on deaf years. Four years later he tried again, this time declaring that as the ruling power in India the EICo had a duty to India to protect its ancient monuments, and the sooner the better. ‘The discovery and publication’, he added, ‘of all the existing remains of architecture and sculpture, with coins and inscriptions, would throw more light on the ancient history of India, both public and domestic, than the printing of all the rubbish contained in the 18 Puranas.’11