Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor

by Charles R. Allen

  At Taxila Cunningham identified three areas of occupation, each enclosed within clearly defined city walls. The best preserved was Sirsuk, neatly laid out like a Roman town with a street grid, temples on raised platforms, massive cut-stone walls and city gates. However, the oldest and largest of the three cities was Bir, to the east of which stood the largest of a number of stupa mounds, referred to by the local inhabitants as the Chir, or ‘Split’, Tope, because of the way it had been torn open by the French general Claude Auguste Court back in the days when he was employed by Maharaja Ranjit Singh. Over the next fifteen years Taxila continued to draw Cunningham like a magnet, for he was fully aware of its importance in India’s early history. He made his last visit in the Cold Weather season of 1878–9, when he was sixty-five – very old for British India where fifty was the usual age for retirement. By then he had developed more sophisticated excavation techniques that took account of lesser objects such as potsherds, fragments of terracotta or even bits of plaster. However, it was the coinage of Taxila that chiefly preoccupied him. The whole area was littered with rectangular copper punch-marked coins, many bearing only a single die stamp, leading him to conclude that this was the earliest form of the Indian punch-marked coin, most probably minted in Taxila and pre-dating the arrival of the Greeks. His discovery of a hoard of punch-marked coins mixed with Greek-type coinage that included coins of the Graeco-Bactrian rulers Pantaleon and Agathocles – probably the sons of Demetrius, who succeeded Euthydemous in about 200 BCE – showed that despite their close contact with Alexander’s successors in Gandhara, the Mauryans had kept to their own style of coinage, displaying only punch-marked symbols most probably related to regions or local mints.

  If Cunningham hoped to find evidence of Ashoka or his grandfather Chandragupta at Taxila, his expectations were never fulfilled. That was left to a later Director-General, John Marshall, who would spend more than fifteen years excavating at Taxila and so love the place that he would build himself a delightful cottage there. This missing link between Ashoka and the city where he spent some years as his father’s viceroy would come in the form of an inscription written in Aramaic, inked and then overcut on to a stone slab, of which only part had survived as a sliver of rock lodged into the wall. It came from Taxila’s Sirkap site, where it had been used for building material for the new Greek-styled city established by the Graeco-Bactrian king Demetrius in about 200 BCE.

  Half of each line is missing but its references to no killing of living beings, respect for Brahmans and monks, obedience to parents and elders and the performance of good works appear to have affinities with the sentiments expressed in RE 3 and RE 11 as inscribed on the edict rocks at nearby Shahbazgarhi and Mansehra – the latter being the fifth Rock Edict to be identified, discovered in the mid-1880s. Near the bottom of the stone sliver the name of Priyadasi has survived, along with a reference to the sons of Priyadasi.

  *

  As Cunningham made his way back to the Gangetic plains towards the end of his tour of 1864–5 he had every reason to feel despondent. In four winter seasons he had identified and surveyed more than 160 ancient sites in northern India, more than justifying the faith shown in him by Lord Canning. But the first Viceroy’s successor, Lord Lawrence, had come looking for budget cuts and Cunningham returned to Calcutta knowing that his archaeological department had been axed.

  Four lean years as a military pensioner in England followed, which Alexander Cunningham put to good use by writing The Ancient Geography of India: the Buddhist Period. Then in January 1869 Lord Mayo arrived in Calcutta to replace Lord Lawrence, the political weathercock turned once more and in 1871 the general returned to India as Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) – and as a Knight Commander of the Indian Empire.

  Sir Alexander Cunningham’s new instructions were to ‘superintend a complete search over the whole country and a systematic record and description of all architectural and other remains that are remarkable alike for their antiquity or their beauty, or their historic interest’. These were brave words but in fact Cunningham’s new remit did not extend to the Madras and Bombay Presidencies. He was, however, provided with sufficient funds to pay for two assistants: an Armenian engineer from the Bengal Public Works Department named Joseph Beglar; and an Englishman, Archibald Carllyle, who had come out to India to tutor the sons of a minor raja and had stayed on to work as a museum curator.

  It is beyond the scope of this book to do justice to the archaeological work undertaken by Cunningham, Beglar, Carllyle and their subordinate staff through the 1870s and into the 1880s. Only a fraction concerns the further disinterring of Ashoka and his times – a process that resumed in the early months of 1871 with Cunningham’s discovery of a box on a shelf at the Asiatic Society of Bengal’s premises in Calcutta bearing the label ‘Rupnath, in Parganah [District] Salimabad’.

  The shrine of Rupnath lies at the very heart of the Indian subcontinent. The temple itself is a simple structure that stands in an attractively wooded glade beside one of three small pools linked by a series of waterfalls descending from the Kaimur hill range. It is well off the beaten track, some thirty-five miles north of Jabalpur and fifteen miles due west of Sleemanabad, which was called Salimabad before the arrival of Colonel James ‘Thugee’ Sleeman, the suppressor of the murderous thugee cult endemic in this part of India in the 1830s.

  Pilgrims come to Rupnath to worship the lingam in the shrine, which has a long association with the Nath order of ascetics. These Naths follow many different paths but all share an antipathy towards caste barriers and honour Matyendranath as their founder, a ninth-century yogi said to have invented Hatha yoga as a spiritual exercise. Despite claiming Lord Shiva as their first master, these Naths stand outside the Brahmanical tradition, representing in their lineage the last phase of Buddhism in India, when tantric ritual entered the Mahayana Buddhist mainstream as a means of attaining spiritual perfection.

  Nath shrines are generally found in remote mountain regions and isolated forests, as at Rupnath. Today the waters that feed the three pools have been dammed, so that a lake extends out into the plain below the lowest of them, but in other respects Rupnath has changed very little since the day in the mid-nineteenth century when the servant of a Colonel Ellis came to this spot, probably to attend the annual mela, or religious fair, held here on Shivaratri, the ‘night of Shiva’, celebrated in late February–early March. This unnamed servant came away from Rupnath with an eye-copy of an inscription engraved on a rock beside the pool, which he gave to his employer, who passed it on to the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta – where it was placed in a box and shelved.

  It was this box that Sir Alexander came upon in 1871 while rummaging through the Society’s shelves. He at once instructed his new senior assistant Joseph Beglar to make a search of the district of Salimabad, between Gaya and Monghyr in Bihar. Beglar duly searched but found nothing. However, the general was not one to let matters rest. He made enquiries and learned of the second Salimabad, now renamed Sleemanabad. Beglar made a new search and soon reported back that he had found both Rupnath and the inscription.

  Cunningham immediately set out to see for himself. ‘Here a small stream breaks over the crest of the Kaimur range’, he afterwards reported, ‘and, after three low falls, forms a deep secluded pool at the foot of the scarp. Each of these pools is considered holy, the uppermost being named after Rama, the next after Lakshmana, and the lowest after Sita. The spot, however, is best known by the name of Rupnath, from a linga of Siva which is placed at a narrow cleft of the rocks.’ The inscription was carved in five lines on a flat boulder beside the lowest lake, its upper surface ‘worn quite smooth by people sitting upon it for hundreds of years at the annual fairs’.

  Sir Alexander Cunningham’s engraving of the Rupnath rock at the foot of the Kaimur Falls, together with his depictions of three other Ashokan sites. (Reproduced in Inscriptions of Aoka, 1877)

  It was an Ashokan edict of the category known today as Mi
nor Rock Edicts (MRE), so clumsily lettered that Cunningham thought it must have been copied by someone with only a rudimentary knowledge of Brahmi lettering. It began in the usual declamatory way – ‘Beloved-of-the-Gods speaks thus’ – but omitted the personal name Piyadasi and the title raja. It went on to give some remarkably personal information about Piyadasi’s conversion to Buddhism and his relations with the Buddhist Church (modern translation): ‘It is now two and a half years since I became a lay-disciple, but until now I have not been very zealous. But now that I have visited the Sangha for more than a year, I have become very zealous.’8

  The key words here were upasaka or ‘lay-disciple’ and yamme samghe upeti, translating literally as ‘went to the Sangha’. It seemed to say that Ashoka had initially become a lay Buddhist and then a year and a half later had entered the Buddhist community of monks, the clear implication being that he had undergone the rites that made him an initiate monk, which would have required him to wear monks’ robes and live in a monastery.

  The edict went on to say how, as a result of Ashoka’s new religious zeal, the people of India who had not previously associated with the gods now did so. It then urged everyone to be zealous in supporting the Dharma:

  Even the humble, if they are zealous, can attain heaven. And this proclamation has been made with this aim. Let both humble and great be zealous, let even those on the borders know and let zeal last long. Then this zeal will increase, it will greatly increase, it will increase up to one and a half times. This message has been proclaimed two hundred and fifty-six times by the king while on tour.9

  These were patently the words of a convert, speaking with all the fervour of the newly converted, eager to share his newfound faith with his subjects – so eager in fact that he appeared to have embarked on a proselytising tour of the country. The words of what is today classified as MRE 1 confirmed Ashoka’s conversion to Buddhism as given in the Great Dynastic Chronicle, which stated that for three years after his anointing Ashoka had remained in his ancestral faith before coming under the influence of his young nephew Nigrodha, who introduced him to Buddhism. This had led Ashoka to visit the Buddhist community and to invite Buddhist monks to join him in his royal abode, after which he had ordered the dissemination of the Dharma throughout his kingdom in the form of a massive building programme of monasteries and stupas.

  The discovery of the Rupnath MRE led Cunningham to take a fresh look at two other inscriptions found some years earlier. The first had come from a cave overlooking the Grand Trunk Road at Sassaram, midway between Benares and Gaya. In 1839 a rough eye-copy of the inscription had been forwarded to the ASB in Calcutta but too late to be seen by James Prinsep and had lain mouldering on a shelf ever since. Joseph Beglar was ordered to Sassaram to find the cave and its edict, which he duly did. It turned out to be another version of the Rupnath MRE – but with the addition of two crucial sentences at the end: ‘And cause ye this matter to be engraved in rocks. And wherever there are stone pillars here (in my dominions), there also cause (it) to be engraved.’10

  So here was King Ashoka in his home ground of Magadha ordering his remarks about his conversion to Buddhism to be written on rocks and existing pillars throughout the land – the clear implication being that no such Ashokan edicts had existed before. Taken together with the crude craftsmanship and clumsy lettering both here at Sassaram and at Rupnath, it pointed to these two MREs being the earliest of Ashoka’s edicts yet found, pre-dating the more extensive and far better written Rock Edicts found at Girnar, Dhauli, Shahbazgarhi and Kalsi – which themselves pre-dated the Pillar Edicts.

  The third inscription to be re-examined was the Bairat-Calcutta inscription, the segment of rock found on the northern borders of Rajputana by Captain Burt back in 1840. In content and appearance it was quite different from the Rupnath and Sassaram MREs, being finely chiselled in large, clear letters on a highly polished surface – possibly a rock face but more probably a pillar.11 Cunningham and his junior assistant Archie Carllyle together explored the site where it had been found, lodged under a large projecting boulder on a hillside south of the village of Bairat, and discovered that the boulder stood beside the remains of two monastic buildings and a stupa on a platform levelled out of the hillside. Clearly the edict and the monastic settlement were linked: ‘As the proclamation is specially addressed to the Buddhist assembly of Magadha, we must suppose … that copies were sent to all the greater Buddhist fraternities for the purpose of recording the enduring firmness of the king’s faith in the law of Buddha.’12

  As Cunningham and Carllyle surveyed the surrounding area the latter’s eye was caught by a ‘bare, black-looking, pyramidal-shaped, jagged-edged, peaked hill, composed entirely of enormous blocks of porphyritic and basaltic rock’. One of the largest of these blocks, as big as a house, had rolled down the hill and on its underside Carllyle spotted what proved to be the third MRE – today known as the Bairat MRE.

  The next significant discovery was far more dramatic. It came at the start of the Cold Weather season of 1873–4 as Alexander Cunningham headed south across the wild country of Bhundelkhand from Allahabad towards Jabalpur in the heart of India. He was, in terms of Buddhist geography, ‘on the high road between Ujjain and Bhilsa in the south, and Kosambi and Sravasti in the north, as well as Pataliputra in the east’.13 As he rode ahead of his party towards the head of the narrow Mahiyar valley, his practised eye was drawn to a stupa-like mound in the distance, out of which protruded what were, unmistakably, the pillars of a stone railing.

  At that first sighting Cunningham could do no more than satisfy himself that what he had found was indeed a stupa, similar in size and design to that at Sanchi, but more like Amaravati in that most of its stonework and bricks had already been removed for building material. Three months later he was back with his team of workmen to begin the excavation of what he named the Great Stupa of Bharhut – the unhelpful word ‘Tope’ at last being considered outmoded.

  Ten days of excavation revealed the remains of a monument that in its heyday must have been just as magnificent as the Great Stupa at Sanchi. Sections of two of the four original ceremonial gateways remained, as well as the segment of circular colonnade linking them. Every one of the great stone beams that had formed the crosspieces of these two gateways had been smashed to pieces, but their four uprights were relatively undamaged, as were the thirty-five pillars and eighty crossbars that made up the railings of the surviving quarter of the colonnade. Unlike at Sanchi, these pillars and crossbars of the colonnade were copiously decorated.

  The most dramatic feature of these pillars were the thirty almost life-size figures of divine kings and various forms of lesser deities – naga rajas, devas and devatas, yakshas and yakshinis – carved on three sides, in particular, the devatas and yakshinis: semi-divine goddesses and attendants with exaggerated, melon-like breasts, narrow waists and wide hips, carved with deliberate intent to make them voluptuous, and always shown with one hand raised in the air grasping the branch of a tree, one leg entwined around the same tree and the other hand approaching or even touching their genitals.

  These female fertility figures were in striking contrast to the male figures found on other faces of the same pillar, carved as idealised symbols of kingship, their faces stern and serene, their arms crossed as if in meditation – although this was merely the sculptor’s way of conveying hands clasped together in the anjali mudra or ‘gesture of reverence’.

  One of the deliberately voluptuous yakshini figures from the Great Stupa at Bharhut – more accurately, vriksh devatas or ‘tree goddess’ embodying female energy and fecundity. These figures are the earliest representations of this central icon of Buddhist art. The tree these goddesses are hugging is the ashoka tree (Saraca indica), considered sacred by Hindus, Buddhists and Jains. Photograph by Joseph Beglar, 1874. (Cunningham, The Stupa of Bharhut, 1879)

  (Left to right) A male yaksha, a female goddess and Chakavaka, King of the Naga snake gods, worshipped as water-spirits. (Cunni
ngham, The Stupa of Bharhut, 1879)

  But for Alexander Cunningham the most intriguing sculpture of all was that of a warrior: ‘His head is bare, and the short curly hair is bound with a broad band or ribbon, which is fastened at the back of the head in a bow, with its long ends streaming in the wind. His dress consists of a tunic with long sleeves, and reaching nearly to the thigh.’ The warrior’s dress, his sandals and the hair tied in a ribbon marked him out as a Greek, perhaps a mercenary of the sort that had helped both Chandragupta and Ashoka win their thrones. His sword, however, was indisputably Indian. ‘We have the description of Arrian,’ wrote Cunningham, ‘“All wear swords of a vast breadth, though scarce exceeding three cubits in length. Those, when they engage in close fight, they clasp with both their hands, that their blow may be the stronger”.’ This evidence of contacts with India’s north-west was strengthened with the discovery that some of the pillars carried mason’s marks using Kharosthi rather than Brahmi lettering, showing that some of the sculptors had been brought in from the Gandhara region.

  The Greek warrior carved on one of the rail pillars at Bharhut, photographed by Joseph Beglar in 1874 with a local tribal woman seated beside him. (APAC, British Library)

  Scarcely less striking were the many scenes of human and sacerdotal activity portrayed on panels, copings, medallions and other elements of the surviving architecture, sculpted in a heavier and less sophisticated style than either at Sanchi or Amaravati – the clearest indication that they pre-dated them.

  By now Cunningham was far more knowledgeable about early Buddhism than he had been when he had excavated at Sanchi, and he had no difficulty in identifying some twenty of these scenes as illustrations of the Jataka Tales. Others showed scenes of important incidents in the life of Sakyamuni Buddha – even though Sakyamuni himself was notable by his absence throughout, being represented only by such symbols as a turban resting on an empty throne or an empty saddle on a horse. Just as at Sanchi and Amaravati, three objects of worship were represented time and time again: the Bodhi tree and its Diamond Throne, the stupa, and the Dharma in the form of the ‘Wheel of the Moral Law’, the chakra.