Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor

by Charles R. Allen

  The mysterious Parkham giant, identified by the inscription on its base as Mauryan. (APAC, British Library)

  Cunningham’s last contribution to Ashokan studies was his work on what is now known as the Mahabodhi temple at Bodhgaya and its restoration. This began in 1877 in the wake of a botched attempt at restoration carried out by Burmese workmen under the orders of the king of Burma. Rajendra Lal Mitra was asked by the government of Bengal to report on the situation and was appalled by what he found: ‘The mischief they have done by their misdirected zeal has been serious,’ he wrote in a damning report. ‘The demolitions and excavations already completed by them have swept away most of the old land-marks and nothing of ancient times can now be traced on the area they have worked on.’17 The Burmese were ordered off the premises and the task was handed over to the ASI, Joseph Beglar assuming onsite control, with Mitra as his adviser. The complex history of the Mahabodhi temple and its surrounds was painstakingly revealed, suggesting that the original Mauryan shrine and protective railings enclosing the Bodhi tree had been replaced by a grander structure and surround at the time of the Kushan king Huvishka in the second century CE. More sections of the original Ashokan railing were recovered, including parts of the four pillars that had supported the original Ashokan shrine and – most dramatic of all – the slab of the Diamond Throne placed by Ashoka at the base of the Bodhi tree. All these features corresponded to the first depictions of Bodhgaya as shown on a number of bas-reliefs at Bharhut.

  Today the decorated upper surface of Ashoka’s Diamond Throne is usually concealed under ornate coverings, while the plinth’s lower sections are completely buried under earth as a result of the Bodhi tree’s growth. However, it is usually possible to catch glimpses of the repeated pattern of acanthus leaves that decorates the sides of the plinth, echoing the motifs found on several of Ashoka’s pillar capitals.

  (Above) Emperor Ashoka’s Diamond Throne at the base of the Bodhi tree, enclosed within a protective pavilion raised on four pillars, one surmounted with an elephant capital. Detail of a panel from the Bharhut stupa. (Cunningham, The Stupa of Bharhut, 1879) (Overleaf) Emperor Ashoka’s Diamond Throne after the restoration of the Mahabodhi temple in the 1880s, showing the Bodhi tree some years after its replanting by Alexander Cunningham. The seated figure is Angarika Dharmapala, a pivotal figure in the Buddhist reform movement that began following his visit to Bodhgaya in 1891. (Theosophical Society of India)

  With the help of an early stone model of the Mahabodhi temple recovered from the ruins, Cunningham, Mitra and Beglar made the best of a bad job. By the time Sir Alexander Cunningham was finally persuaded to step down he was aged seventy-one. He sailed from Bombay in September 1885 on board the steamship Indus, which soon afterwards struck a rock off Ceylon and foundered, taking with it much of Cunningham’s collection of coins. Cunningham himself got to shore unscathed and was able to congratulate himself on having previously sent on ahead his best gold and silver pieces, now in the British Museum. He died in South Kensington eight years later, by which time almost all the missing pieces in the Buddhist jigsaw he had tried to fill with the help of Faxian and Xuanzang had been found – almost but not quite.

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  India after Cunningham

  The Lumbini pillar with its inscription barely visible below ground level, soon after its excavation by General Sumsher Khadga Rana in 1896. Photograph by Dr Anton Führer. (APAC, British Library)

  Sir Alexander Cunningham’s brief never extended to the Madras and Bombay Presidencies. In 1873 Dr James Burgess, editor of the Indian Antiquary and chief disciple of James Fergusson, had been appointed Archaeological Surveyor for Western India. Two years later, following intense lobbying from James Fergusson, Sir Walter Elliot and other grandees in England, Burgess was given the additional charge of archaeology in south India. Following Cunningham’s retirement he was appointed Surveyor General for the whole of India and his triumph over his former rival appeared to be absolute, even if Cunningham’s senior assistant Joseph Beglar continued to challenge his authority as Archaeological Surveyor for Bengal.

  Burgess’s interests were very different from those of Cunningham, focusing on architecture rather than archaeology and, in particular, the Buddhist cave temples of western India and their inscriptions. This may account for his failure to take due notice of what Cunningham had always considered to be a prime archaeological site but which he himself had never been allowed to examine: Amaravati.

  The result was that Amaravati continued to suffer the assaults of amateur archaeologists and locals in search of building material, culminating in an order from the governor of Madras to clear the site. It meant that when Burgess finally got around to excavating there himself in 1882 he found little more than what he himself described as ‘a large pit’.1

  Burgess’s only achievement at Amaravati was to note that a number of the remaining stone slabs had been carved on both sides and that the stupa had apparently suffered some violent destruction at an early stage, probably in the second century BCE when the Satavahana dynasty was in the process of moving in to fill the vacuum left by the Mauryas. It had then been restored and greatly enlarged when the nearby city of Dhanyakataka had become the capital of the Satavahana rulers of Andra. However, Burgess has to be given some credit for his subsequent survey of the archaeological sites upstream of Amaravati and his discovery of the Jaggayyapeta bas-relief (see illustration p. 93).

  The Jaggayyapeta slab excited little interest then and it has been largely overlooked since. Yet taken together with the surviving Wheel-turning Monarch scenes from Amaravati, it demonstrates that the cult of the Chakravartin was now well established within India, from where it would spread to China and beyond.

  Burgess’s authority never extended to the two largest princely states in South India: Hyderabad and Mysore. Here it was left to local enthusiasts to advance the cause of Ashokan studies, most notably Benjamin Lewis Rice, who had been born in Bangalore (also in the annus mirabilis of 1837) and had returned there in the early 1860s to be the headmaster of a high school. Bangalore was then the British administrative centre for the princely state of Mysore and in due course Rice was made Inspector of Schools and Director of Public Instruction for Mysore State. In the course of his duties he toured the state on horseback and became increasingly interested in the many inscribed stones he came across in the course of his travels. With the help of Sanskrit and Kannada pandits he began to collect and decipher these ancient scripts, eventually amassing over nine thousand inscriptions. On his retirement he was appointed Mysore State’s director of archaeology, a position he held until he finally left India in 1906 at the age of seventy.

  Lewis Rice’s memorial is his twelve-volume Epigraphia Carnatica, but his biggest coup came in 1892, when he discovered no less than three Ashokan Minor Rock Edicts in Mysore State: the Brahmagiri, Jatinga-Ramesvara and Siddapur MREs – all found in close proximity beside the River Chinna Hagari in the Chitaldroog (Chitradurga) District of what is now Karnataka, about 150 miles north of Bangalore. All three were the work of the same hand, who had signed himself ‘Capada’ in Kharosthi and had described himself as a ‘scribe’, suggesting to Lewis Rice that he had probably come from the Taxila region: ‘The inference is that the scribe may have been an official transferred from the extreme north to the extreme south of the empire, which implies a freer inter-communication than has been generally supposed to exist at that period.’

  Shortly before Lewis Rice’s departure he presided over an even greater discovery when a Brahmin from Tanjore presented the newly opened Mysore Oriental Library with a collection of palm-leaf texts in Sanskrit. It included a copy of the Arthashastra, or ‘Treatise on State Economy’, which set out in fifteen chapters how a ruler should be selected, educated and directed to govern a well-ordered kingdom. This was a work of almost legendary status that was said to have been in wide circulation until the Hindu kingdoms were overwhelmed by the Muslim sultanates, after which all copies had apparently disapp
eared. It was then presumed lost – until this one surviving copy was identified by Shama Shastry, the Librarian of the Mysore Oriental Library.

  In its surviving form the Treatise on State Economy was ascribed to an editor or redactor named Vishnugupta, writing in the early Gupta era, but the original work had always been credited to the Brahman Chanakya, also known as Kautilya, the ‘crow-like’. This was the hero of The Minister’s Signet Ring political drama and of the Puranas who in the fourth century BCE had overthrown the base-born King Nanda and placed his protégé Chandragupta on the throne. Indeed, Chanakya’s authorship was confirmed within the text itself, for in its penultimate paragraph he had written that this was the work of ‘one who forcibly and quickly achieved the liberation of the mother-country, of its culture and learning (and) its military power, from the grip of the Nanda kings’.2

  The Treatise on State Economy had initially been passed by oral transmission by Chanakya to his disciples and they to theirs until finally committed to paper. When it resurfaced in Mysore in the early twentieth century it was quickly recognised for what it was: a highly sophisticated, practical – and in its own time, revolutionary – treatise on statecraft and government that had underpinned the administration of Chandragupta and his immediate successors.

  Its revolutionary aspect came from the claim by its author that the key to good government lies not in prayers, sacrifices to the gods or offerings to Brahmans but in trained leadership. The skills of kingship could be taught, but only to those who already possessed the desire and ability to learn, the capacity to retain and to draw the right inferences from what they learned, and the willingness to show obedience to their teachers. Through association with learned teachers the future ruler learned self-discipline by their example, which led to increased self-possession and greater efficiency in acquiring knowledge. Only by being disciplined, learned, conscious of the welfare of all beings and devoted to just government, could a king hope to rule unopposed. ‘In the happiness of his subjects lies the king’s happiness,’ runs perhaps the most famous passage in Chanakya’s Treatise, ‘in their welfare his welfare. He shall not consider as good only that which pleases him but treat as beneficial to him whatever pleases his subjects.’ These were sentiments that would be reflected in stone in the edicts of Chandragupta’s grandson, who would have been steeped in the contents of the Treatise as part of his princely education.

  Kingship was the standard polity of the Aryans in India, going right back to the quasi-mythical King Prithu, imposed on anarchic humankind by the gods and infused with divinity. However, Chanakya challenged this tradition by arguing that the first king was Manu, elected by the people as the person most fit to rule, and who ruled not by divine right but by virtue of a contract between ruler and ruled. So long as he guaranteed the welfare of the people the king had the right to enforce law and order. Being of Kshatriya birth was a prerequisite, certainly, but no king was fit to rule unless he possessed the highest qualities of intellect, leadership, resolution and self-discipline. He had also to take the advice of his ministers and respect his chief minister as a son his father. That chief minister was, of course, a Brahman, and in the Treatise on State Economy he is glorified as the only person of equal standing to the king – with the right to depose him should the king became a tyrant or if he impoverished his people.

  As his title suggests, Chanakya laid great stress on the responsibility of the ruler to build a sound economy, since good government requires a well-ordered administration with high ethical standards that allow trade, business and agriculture to flourish. However, side by side with these high ideals, Chanakya stressed the importance of learning the cruder aspects of kingship: how to secure and hold a kingdom; what tactics to employ in invading an enemy’s territory and capturing an enemy fortress; the use of spy networks; and the seven strategies for dealing with and overcoming neighbouring powers, which included appeasement, punishment, bribery, deceit, deception and dividing the opposition.

  It was this aspect of the Treatise that caught the public attention when it became the subject of much discussion in political and academic circles in India in the 1920s. It became fashionable to describe Chanakya as the Indian Machiavelli, a glib comparison that the future Prime Minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru rejected when writing his Discovery of India in a British jail. Machiavelli, after all, was a failed theoretician, whereas Chanakya was an extremely successful one who had carried his ideas through into fruition:

  Bold and scheming, proud and resourceful, never forgetting a slight, never forgetting his purpose, availing himself of every device to delude and defeat the enemy, he sat with the reins of empire in his hands and looked upon the emperor more as a loved pupil than as a master … There was hardly anything Chanakya would have refrained from doing to achieve his purpose; he was unscrupulous enough, yet he was also wise enough to know that this very purpose might be defeated by means unsuited to the end.3

  Chanakya, it seems, was as much a role model for Pandit Nehru as he was for the grandson of the man he made king. It is an indication of Nehru’s high regard for the author of the Treatise on State Economy that when he became Prime Minister of India he ordered the new diplomatic enclave being laid out in New Delhi to be named Chanakyapuri or ‘the city of Chanakya’.

  The reappearance of the Treatise in the first decade of the twentieth century came in the wake of a raft of scholarly publications, all of which shed further light on the Mauryas. Dr Émile Senart’s Inscriptions de Piyadassi (1881) improved on Cunningham’s work and was itself improved upon by Dr Eugen (Ernst) Hultzsch, whose revised edition of Inscriptions of Aoka (1925) remains the standard work on the subject. In Britain Edward Cowell,4 former principal of the Sanskrit College in Calcutta before becoming the first Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Cambridge, contributed to Professor Max Müller’s Sacred Books of the East series and joined with Robert Alexander Neil, translator of the Buddhist Jataka Tales, to produce the Divyavadana or ‘Buddhist Tales’. In Ceylon the pioneering work by George Turnour was taken up by two of a later generation of Ceylon Civil Service administrators: Robert Caesar Childers and Thomas Rhys Davids. In 1872 Childers became Sub-librarian at the India Office and in that same year published the first part of his Dictionary of the Pali Language. He subsequently became the first Professor of Pali at London University but died in 1876, whereupon Rhys Davids then assumed his mantle, going on to form the Pali Text Society in 1881.

  Within the Indian subcontinent the Archaeological Survey of India went through another bad patch as local provinces sought to reassert themselves. The two Afghan Wars had ensured that Afghanistan remained out of bounds and a very similar state of affairs existed in Nepal, where its Rana rulers remained deeply suspicious of the British government in India and its intentions. However, that situation changed when in the mid-1890s reports began to be received of an inscribed pillar known locally as Bimasenaki nigali or ‘Bhim Sen’s smoking pipe’, said to have been seen by the Nepalese governor of Western Nepal. In March 1895 Dr Anton Führer, archaeological surveyor to the government of the North-West Provinces and Oude (today Uttar Pradesh), was authorised to cross the border on an elephant. He duly located two sections of a monumental pillar, the shorter and lower shaft of which bore a short inscription in Brahmi, slightly damaged but readable.

  The Nigliva Sagar inscription, erected by Emperor Ashoka twenty years after his consecration. Photographed by Anton Führer in 1895. (APAC, British Library)

  Führer sent a copy of the inscription to his mentor and patron Dr Georg Bühler, by then Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Vienna, who showed it to be a hitherto unknown form of Ashokan memorial. It reads (in a modern translation by Professor Harry Falk):

  When king Priyadarsin, dear to the gods, was consecrated for this 14th regal year he enlarged the stupa of Buddha Konagamana to double its size. When he was consecrated for his 20th [?] regnal year he came in person and paid homage and had a stone pillar erected.5

  The i
nscription showed that in the fourteenth year of his reign as anointed ruler – or about the year 256 BCE – Ashoka had ordered the enlarging of an existing memorial to Buddha Konagamana, one of the Buddhas said to have preceded Buddha Sakyamuni. He had then visited the site himself six years later, in about 250 BCE. The Chinese traveller Xuanzang had seen just such a stupa together with an Ashokan pillar south-east of the city of Kapilavastu.

  Despite their best efforts, Cunningham and his colleagues had failed to locate both Kapilavastu, the city where Sakyamuni had been raised as Prince Siddhartha, and Lumbini, the nearby garden in which he had been born.

  Führer’s discovery initiated a race to find that fabled city and the Lumbini Garden, because Xuanzang and his compatriot Faxian had both placed Lumbini near Kapilavastu, and Kapilavastu several days’ journey east of Sravasti, located by Alexander Cunningham back in 1863. The full story of the race to find these two prime Buddhist sites has been told elsewhere.6 It tells how in November 1896 Dr Führer was again allowed to enter Nepalese territory, only to be escorted to the camp of the local governor, General Khadga Shumsher Rana, and shown a standing pillar with a prominent crack running down from the top. The general’s sappers then dug round the base of the pillar to a depth of about five feet to uncover four and a half lines of beautifully cut Brahmi, perfectly preserved.