Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor

by Charles R. Allen

  The obvious answer is that this was the scene of Ashoka’s Third Buddhist Council, a convention regarded by him as so important that he chose to build India’s first monumental building of stone, very probably importing architects and stonemasons from Persia to do the job. Dr Spooner certainly thought so but then rather spoiled his case by going on to argue that the Mauryan rulers may themselves have been Persian in origin.11 John Marshall was quick to downplay Spooner’s Persian claims, which had not gone down well in Patna, a centre of Indian nationalist feeling. Yet outside influence there undoubtedly was, as displayed in the capital found by Waddell, which is incontestably Graeco-Persian in inspiration if not in manufacture.

  The last important Ashokan discovery of the nineteenth century took place in North Bihar in 1898, in the wake of Dr Führer’s announcement that he had discovered the birthplace of the Buddha at Lumbini and his home city of Kapilavastu. In January 1898 – just as Dr Führer was desperately trying to save his reputation at an excavation just a few miles away – a local landowner named William Claxton Peppé opened the largest of a number of stupa mounds on his estate at Piprahwa. Its location was significant: just half a mile south of the Nepal border, 10 miles south-west of Lumbini and its Ashokan pillar, 17 miles south of the Nigliva Sagar Ashokan pillar, 12 miles south-east of the Gotihawa Ashokan pillar, and 15 miles southeast of Tilaurakot, the site of ancient Kapilavastu.

  At a depth of twenty-four feet, at the very centre and base of the stupa, Peppé found a large sandstone coffer, weighing some three-quarters of a ton, within which were five soapstone reliquaries, a crystal bowl and a mass of small jewels shaped like flowers, semi-precious stones and other offerings. Overlooked in the initial excitement were some ashes and bone fragments, afterwards presented to the King of Siam, and a short inscription in Brahmi lettering crudely inscribed round the top of one of the soapstone vases.

  The Piprahwa reliquary vase (centre) showing part of the Brahmi inscription carved round its lid. (Photo courtesy of Neil Peppé)

  That inscription was first read by Vincent Smith and then by Dr Führer, who sent a hand-drawn copy to Professor Georg Bühler in Vienna. Like so many epigraphists since, Bühler was baffled by three letters that spelled out su ki ti, but the general import of the rest of the inscription seemed quite clear:

  This relic shrine of the divine Buddha (is the donation) of the Sakya Sukiti brothers, associated with their sisters, sons and wives.

  It was Professor Bühler’s belief that what William Peppé had found was the Sakya clan’s share of the relics of Sakyamuni Buddha, making it the oldest inscription yet found in India.14 So it was initially assumed that what Peppé had opened was a brick stupa raised by Ashoka over the original mud stupa that had covered the Buddha’s ashes, as recounted in the Legend of King Ashoka and by Xuanzang. Moreover, a second excavation of the same site conducted in 1972–3 by K. M. Srivastiva showed that the stupa was of the Kushan era, built over an earlier mud stupa. But what also came to light was an earlier deposition of relics two feet below the place where the stone coffer had stood, with evidence that this had been disturbed at the time the stone coffer with its reliquaries and reliquary offerings were added.

  Because of Peppé’s links with Führer and the subsequent death of Bühler, doubts continue to be raised about the authenticity of the Piprahwa site and its inscription. Yet, except for those on the lunatic fringe of Buddhist studies, there can be no question but that the Piprahwa inscription is a genuine document and a very early one at that.

  To date, approximately fifty Buddha relic inscriptions have been found on the Indian subcontinent, mainly from the region of ancient Gandhara in or close to Afghanistan but with a second big cluster in and around Sanchi in central India. Only one has been discovered in the Buddhist heartland of Magadha itself – at Piprahwa. Here alone the relics are referred to as salilanidhane budhasa bhagavate sakiyanam, or ‘relic receptacle of the blessed Buddha of the Sakyas’, and nowhere else is the term nidhane used for the term ‘reliquary’ rather than the more usual samudaga or manjusa found elsewhere. Yet this only points to the greater authenticity of the inscription. ‘The Piprahwa inscription rings true in all regards,’ the epigraphist Professor Richard Salomon has argued. ‘Its language is a good specimen of Ardhamagadhi [early Magadhan Prakrit] … It would have taken a very brilliant linguist to come up with such an excellent imitation of this little-documented language over one hundred years ago.’15

  So who put the Piprahwa inscription there and when? The simplicity of its lettering points either to an early date in the evolution of Brahmi – or to a rustic interpretation of Brahmi as conceived in this distant corner of Magadha. But that takes no account of the unique stone coffer in which the reliquary was found and the sheer quantity and quality of the relic offerings – amounting to more than 1400 individual items in all – which include lapidary work of an order found in no other reliquary deposition. Somebody very important ordered these grave goods and stone coffer, this last probably hewn from the very same quarry at Chunar on the Ganges from which Ashoka’s other monumental works had come.

  From the combined evidence of the two excavations at Piprahwa it is possible to construct a scenario in which members of the Sakya clan buried their share of the relics of their distinguished family member near Kapilavastu city – relics that were subsequently disturbed by Emperor Ashoka or his representative as part of his Sakya relic redistribution programme as described in the Legend of King Ashoka, Xuanzang’s account and other sources. The emperor then ordered the reburial of some part of the sage’s relics with due ceremony and added his own simple stupa on top, which was afterwards enlarged by the Kushans.

  Among those caught up in the Lumbini-Kapilavastu-Piprahwa controversy in the last months of the nineteenth century were Vincent Smith in India and the Pali scholar T. W. Rhys Davids, by then Secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society in London. By 1900 Smith had had enough and took early retirement to become a full-time historian. His Asoka, the Buddhist Emperor of India appeared a year later. It so happened that T. W. Rhys Davids had also been working on a book on Ashoka, which illness had prevented him from completing. His response was to write Buddhist India, published in 1903. These two books brought the name of Ashoka out of the scholarly closet and into the world domain. After two thousand years of obscurity India’s emperor was once more a public figure.

  15

  Ashoka in the Twentieth Century

  The Ashokan lion capital at Sarnath, with the inscribed pillar in the foreground. Only fragments were found of the Wheel of the Moral Law, which the four lions had originally supported. Photographed by Madho Prasad in 1905. (APAC, British Library)

  It seems entirely appropriate that the man who introduced modern archaeological methods to India should have had the same name as the first British Orientalist, John Marshall – and that the man who appointed him, Lord Curzon, should have been almost alone among British proconsuls in India in sharing Warren Hastings’s fascination for Indian culture and history. It was Curzon who declared that ‘the sacredness of India haunts me like a passion’ and it was this empathy for Indian culture that led him to insist that the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) should be thoroughly overhauled, centralised and equipped with enough funds to do its job properly. He refused to countenance the appointment of a local man to head the ASI and saw to it that a professional trained in the latest techniques was brought in, even if he was a twenty-six-year-old who had never set foot in Asia.

  This second John Marshall arrived in India 238 years after the first. In the course of the next twenty-six years he transformed the entire archaeological scene in India and the ASI with it. ‘Even at that early date’, he wrote some years after his retirement, ‘it was patent to me that the future of archaeology in India must depend more and more on the degree of interest taken in it by Indians themselves, and that the surest way of strengthening my own Department was to provide it with an increasing number of Indian recruits.’1 Marshall began by se
tting up government scholarships, the first person to win one being Daya Ram Sahni, who subsequently followed Marshall as Director-General, and the second R. D. Banerjee, whose excavations at Mohenjo-Daro in 1922 revealed the existence of the pre-Aryan Indus Civilisation. Initially, however, Marshall had to make the best use of what European experts were available, some highly qualified, and others who were no more than local enthusiasts – the last in a long line of amateurs.

  John Marshall and his wife seated on the slopes of a stupa mound at Rajgir, Bihar, c. 1918. (APAG, British Library)

  One of the latter was Mr F. O. Oertal, executive engineer of Benares Division, whose only archaeological qualification was that he had spent some years in Burma in the Public Works Department (PWD). In the Cold Weather of 1904–5, with John Marshall’s permission and acting on his advice, Oertal conducted his own excavation at Sarnath, exposing an area west of the great Dharmekh stupa that Cunningham had left relatively untouched. It proved to be the site’s main shrine, a square temple constructed during the Gupta period but overlaying an earlier structure, which included polished monolithic railings cut from Chunar sandstone that were unmistakably Ashokan. Immediately to the west of the shrine Oertal uncovered the lower section of an Ashokan column still embedded on its base but broken just at the point where the fourth line of the oldest of its three sets of inscriptions had been cut (see illustration, p. 331). Three inscribed fragments of pillar found nearby were enough for most of the inscription to be read. It was another of Emperor Ashoka’s Schism Edicts, directed at the monks and nuns of the Buddhist Sangha, warning them against dividing their community.

  At Sanchi the pillar had been capped by a magnificent but damaged capital made up of four lions back to back, brought to light by Cunningham and Maisey in 1851. It now fell to Oertal to improve upon that at Sarnath. He disinterred his lion capital a few yards away from the pillar upon which it had stood when Xuanzang came to the Deer Park in about the year 637 (see illustration, p. 331). To the delight of all who witnessed the discovery, it was not only in much better condition than the Sanchi capital but of far superior artistry, suggesting that here was the original and the other a copy. Where the two capitals also differed was in the abacus. At Sanchi this had been decorated with pairs of geese, whereas here the frieze showed four perfectly modelled animals: a lion with twitching tail, an elephant, a bull and a galloping horse, interspersed with the twenty-four-spoked Wheel of the Moral Law.

  Each of these four animals has its place as a symbol of Buddhism: the lion represents Sakyasimha, lion of the Sakya clan, with the voice of a lion; the elephant signifies Sakyamuni entering the womb of his mother Mayadevi in her dream, but also Sakyamuni as the tamer of wild elephants; the horse, besides being a symbol of temporal royalty, is the vehicle that carried Prince Siddhartha on his journey of renunciation; finally, the bull is the great inseminator, here symbolising the Buddha’s teaching, the Dharma. The horse and elephant together support the Wheel-turning Monarch.

  Both at Sarnath and Sanchi the four lions had originally supported a large Wheel of the Moral Law, and in both places that wheel had been smashed into too many pieces to attempt a reconstruction. At Sanchi Cunningham had concluded that an earthquake or some other natural cause had brought down pillar and capital, but here it seemed more likely that human violence had been responsible.

  There is no finer demonstration of the state of sculpture at the time of Ashoka than the Sarnath lion capital. It is no exaggeration to speak of it as the work of a Mauryan Michelangelo, a craftsman whose mastery over his material was as complete as anything produced by the Assyrians, the Persians or the Greeks – and who could well have been the same genius who sculpted the Didarganj Yakshi. Yet he and his school, which would include those who produced the few surviving Ashokan pillar capitals, bells and drums, appear as if from nowhere. They have no known precedents in India other than the clumsy monumental figures found by Cunningham’s assistants at Parkham and Besnagar. This new fluency had to come from somewhere, and the surviving works themselves point to Seleucid Bactria and its Graeco-Persian craftsmen, which is entirely plausible given Ashoka’s family ties, his grandfather’s and father’s known links with their Western neighbours, and his own ties as set down on the Rock Edicts. It points to the arrival of a group of sculptors and stonemasons and a dramatic move away from working in wood to stone, a very costly break with tradition only made possible by royal command and patronage.

  But if this same master sculptor enjoyed the patronage of Ashoka, why is it that we have no sculptures of his employer? Ashoka would have been aware of the cult of royal personality on the Persian and Greek models exemplified by their coinage, yet it seems that he declined to follow suit. No iconic images of the Buddha himself were permitted in Ashoka’s lifetime so it may be that the Mauryas extended this prohibition to images of themselves. But what is equally feasible is that images of Ashoka were indeed made in his lifetime but that none have survived – unless that massive stone figure of a supposed demigod found by Cunningham at Parkham is actually the statue of a Mauryan king.

  Whoever those first sculptors and stonemasons were, they appear to have come from the north-west and set up one workshop under royal patronage at Mathura and possibly another at Varanasi, which laid the foundations for an increasingly indigenous Indian school of sculpture whose works subsequently graced Bharhut, Sanchi, Amaravati and many other Buddhist and Jain monuments now lost and forgotten.

  On seeing what Oertal had dug up at Sarnath, Marshall reognised that it was too important a site to be left to the PWD. So extensive were his subsequent finds and of such outstanding quality that Marshall asked for and secured funds to build India’s first onsite museum to house them. He went on to do the same at Sanchi and Taxila, returning to these last two sites again and again over the next twenty-five years.

  In the meantime more Rock Edicts continued to be discovered, mostly of the Minor Rock Edict (MRE) category, with a notable cluster in Mysore State: at Maski in Raichur District, Karnataka, in 1915; at Erragudi in Anantapur District, Andhra Pradesh, in 1928 – this one found in close proximity to a major Rock Edict site bearing REs 1–13 spread over five boulders, now known as the Erragudi Rock Edict; at Govimath, in Raichur District, Karnataka, in 1931; at Palkigundu, also in Raichur District, Karnataka, in 1931; and at Rajula-Mandagiri, Kurnool District, Andhra Pradesh, in 1946.

  Of these, one stood out from the rest: the Maski MRE, discovered by a gold prospector. The lettering was severely damaged in parts but it was still possible to see that in place of the standard opening found on the other MREs the Maski MRE begins:

  De va na pi ya sa A sho ka sa

  To this day the Rupnath MRE remains the only place where Ashoka’s name has been found carved in stone on one of his edicts, although it is quite possible that other such examples have yet to be discovered, just as others have probably been lost for ever, destroyed either by human activity or the forces of nature.

  In Afghanistan the distrust of the British engendered by the First and Second Afghan Wars continued well into the twentieth century. It meant that when Afghanistan finally began to open up to the West in the 1920s, under the modernising King Amanullah, it was the French who won exclusive rights to conduct excavations in Afghanistan under the leadership of Dr Alfred Foucher, who had studied at the Sanskrit College in Benares and, courtesy of John Marshall, had cut his teeth at excavations in India’s North-West Frontier Province and at Sanchi. It was Foucher who invented the term ‘Graeco-Buddhist’ to describe the religious art produced in Gandhara, and who argued, like Cunningham before him, that the influence of classical Gandharan art penetrated deep into India and beyond.2 Foucher spent months following the trails of Alexander the Great and Xuanzang across Afghanistan, leading to the discovery of numerous archaeological sites. Under his aegis, the excavation of the Gandharan summer capital of Kapisha at Begram, begun in 1936, and the subsequent unearthing of the Begram Treasure, proved to be the first of a series of spectacular d
iscoveries that provided ample evidence of Gandhara’s dominant role as an international crossroads and as a major catalyst for change in the region before, during and after the Mauryan era.

  In the course of these excavations numerous texts written in Greek, Aramaic and Brahmi script were discovered, but only one of these could be directly linked to Ashoka: a triangular fragment of rock inscribed in Aramaic, found in the Laghman region just west of the town of Jalalabad in 1930. This turned out to contain elements of both Ashoka’s Rock and Pillar Edicts in Prakrit language but transliterated into Aramaic script. No further Ashokan finds were made until 1958, when an inscribed rock boulder was spotted by chance at the foot of a ridge beside the ancient highway leading out of Kandahar westwards to Herat. It was a bilingual Ashokan edict, written in Greek and Aramaic. The two texts differed slightly but both carried the same message from Ashoka, his name being written in Greek as ‘Piodasses’. It was dated from the tenth year after Ashoka’s consecration and echoed the prohibitions against killing and respect for others to be found in a number of the Rock and Pillar Edicts.

  Five years later a second inscribed rock was found not far from the first in the ruins of ancient Kandahar. This was entirely in Greek and carried the end of RE 12 and the beginning of RE 13. In that same year part of a quite different inscription was picked up in Kandahar bazaar: a scrap of rock inscribed with part of PE 7, written in Aramaic. These finds show that a number of Ashoka’s Rock Edicts and Pillar Edicts or their amalgams, had at one time been erected in ancient Gandhara at least as far west as Kandahar – which is approximately 1300 miles from Patna.

  It is John Marshall’s restoration work that makes Sanchi such a delight to visit today. He kept being drawn back to the site, in 1918 writing to a friend that Sanchi was ‘just as beautiful and fascinating as ever – nay, more so than it ever was in the old days’.3 Part of this fascination lay in the fact that his old friend Alfred Foucher – ‘a first rate scholar and a Frenchman of the nicest type’ – had realised that the gateways of the Great Stupa of Sanchi and the single gateway of Stupa 2 were essentially memorials to the spread of the Dharma.4