Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor

by Charles R. Allen

  This fainting episode is one of several such instances described in Lanka’s Great Dynastic Chronicle, suggesting either that Ashoka was a highly emotional type or that he suffered from something like epilepsy – the ‘falling sickness’ of antiquity. All in all, Prince Ashoka appears to have been physically afflicted to a degree that disqualified him as a potential heir to the throne.

  Yet even as an unwanted prince Ashoka was educated as a son of the most powerful ruler India had yet known. Everything we know about Ashoka points to the continuing influence of Chanakya through his grandson Radhagupta – and perhaps Kautilya, the ‘crow-like’, was someone with whom the ugly prince could identify. A point much emphasised by Chanakya in his Treatise on State Economy is the importance of associating with learned men, and this Ashoka seems to have taken to heart, for he certainly had powerful friends at court, including Bindusara’s chief minister Radhagupta, who appears to have led a conspiracy to exclude the heir-apparent Sushima in favour of Ashoka. Bindusara may have got wind of this, which would explain why at an unreasonably early age Ashoka was despatched to Taxila to put down a local rebellion, although it could be that even in his early teens Ashoka was seen as the most capable of the king’s male offspring as well as the most dangerous. After all, his early nickname was canda, ‘wrathful’ or ‘storm-like’, and this appellation may well have predated Ashoka’s supposed cruelties as ruler. Certainly, his very appearance at Taxila seems to have been enough to restore order.

  Taxila in 287 BCE or thereabouts was still very much the international crossroads where Greek, Persian and Aramaic were as much spoken as Indian Prakrit. Prince Ashoka was welcomed as the grandson of the local hero Chandragupta, liberator and vanquisher of Seleukos the Victor, and that welcome seems to have left its mark on the teenager. Renewed family ties with leaders of the mountain tribes stood him in good stead a decade later.

  Prince Ashoka’s reward for the pacification of Taxila was to be sent south as his father’s viceroy to Ujjain, the capital of Avanti (today Madhya Pradesh). This continuing exile set Ashoka among Buddhists and it was here that he met Devi, the daughter of a merchant from Vidisha. That she was a Sakyakumari, a princess claiming descent from the family of Sakyamuni Buddha, may be a pious fiction, but she was undoubtedly a devout Buddhist. We have the touching evidence of the tapped-out message on the rock shelter at Panguraria that this was a close, loving relationship unlike the usual dynastic arrangement. Devi gave Ashoka his first two children – the boy Mahendra/Mahinda, born in about the year 285 BCE, and the girl Sanghamitta, born about three years later.

  Yet Devi failed to convert Ashoka to her faith and he left her and their children in Vidisha when finally recalled to Pataliputra. It would have been unfitting for a prince of the house of Maurya to have a merchant’s daughter for a spouse, and a more suitable wife was found for him in Asandhimitra, afterwards his chief queen. She probably came from a little kingdom in what is now East Haryana north of Delhi, for it seems more than coincidence that the little town of Assandh boasts what it claims to be the biggest Ashokan stupa in India, 80 feet high and 250 feet in diameter.

  In about the year 274 BCE a second revolt broke out in Taxila and this time the crown prince was sent to deal with it. It was more serious than the first and Prince Sushima was forced to stay on. In the meantime, King Bindusara fell seriously ill and ordered Sushima’s recall, with Ashoka to replace him – whereupon Ashoka’s ally at the palace, the minister Radhagupta, stepped in to suppress the royal order. Ashoka himself bought time by feigning illness but then confronted his father to demand that he declare him his temporary regent – an act so shocking that it brought on an apoplectic fit that killed Bindusara. Sushima returned to Pataliputra to find his young half-brother in occupation and the gates defended by Greek giants – presumably mercenaries with such a fearful reputation that they inspired terror or even a continuing echo of Sikander, whose name was still evoked to shush naughty children right up into the nineteenth century. The continuing presence of Greek mercenaries in India is exemplified in the Greek warrior figure uncovered by Cunningham at Bharhut.

  The killing of Sushima at Pataliputra’s eastern gate was the first round in a four-year war of succession that the Northern Buddhists (those following what became the Mahayana school of Buddhism) afterwards remembered as the dark period of Ashoka the Wrathful, when all sorts of horrors were perpetrated in Ashoka’s name, including the killing of his ninety-nine remaining half-brothers and Ashoka’s Hell; most likely exaggerations of real events embroidered by the writers of the Legend of King Ashoka to present Ashoka as an evil-doer transformed by conversion. Yet even the milder Great Dynastic Chronicle admits that Ashoka fought his way to the throne and that four years passed before he felt able to proclaim himself ruler of Magadha.

  Ashoka then did what the strongest contenders have always done when no social constraints are there to hold them back, which was to eliminate all rivals in the male line, his uterine brother Tissa/Vitashoka being the exception. Only when all threats had been removed did Ashoka feel able to undergo the ceremony of cleansing, anointing and consecration by Brahman priests that made him a king by divine authority. He thereupon took the title Devanamapriya, ‘Beloved-of-the-Gods’, first used by his grandfather and subsequently used by his grandson Dasharatha, and the regnal name of Priyadasi, ‘beloved-to-behold’ – perhaps to make up for his physical shortcomings. His younger brother became vice-regent, a position he abused before being made to see the error of his ways by Ashoka and resigning his office to become a Buddhist hermit – a convoluted story that may be the glossing over of the enforced exile of a beloved but troublesome younger brother.

  The consecrated Devanamapriya Priyadasi began his rule in or around 270 BCE by following his father in supporting a large number of Brahmans at court. He patently had no time for the Buddhists at this stage. The Northern tradition speaks of both Ashoka and his queen as heretics who attempted to destroy the Bodhi tree, with Ashoka using his troops to destroy other sites associated with the Buddha. This seems unlikely for a man whose first wife was a Buddhist, but it may represent his indifference to his senior queen’s overt hostility towards Buddhism.

  Within four or five years of his anointing, Ashoka took the first steps that would shape the remainder of his life and his rule, and here we should not discount the likelihood that Ashoka, once secured on the throne at Pataliputra, summoned the wife and two children left behind in Vidisha – all three brought up in the Buddhist faith. That his conversion was prompted either by the example of the young novice monk Samudra, who underwent torture at Ashoka’s Hell (Northern tradition), or by the little boy-monk Nigrodha, son of the older half-brother he had killed (Southern tradition), can be taken as pious fiction overlying a grain of truth: that Ashoka’s authority was restricted by the power of the Brahmans at court and he responded by transferring his patronage to a less threatening group, the Buddhists – as a result of which the latter’s influence expanded dramatically by virtue of their access to the king.

  The king had at least six named wives, besides concubines, and fathered at least eleven sons and three daughters.12 Only the Great Dynastic Chronicle mentions Ashoka’s two eldest children by his first wife, Mahinda and Sanghamitta, but the early dating of its source, the Dipavamsa, or ‘Island Chronicle’, predating all others, and its soundness in other respects, demand that we take it seriously. The Minor Rock Edicts inform us Ashoka became a lay Buddhist in or about 265 BCE, even if by his own confession he did not take this conversion seriously for the first two and a half years. A year or two after their father’s nominal commitment to Buddhism, Mahinda and Sanghamitta became fully ordained as initiate monk and nun. The boy would then have been about eleven or twelve and his sister Sanghamitta about eight or nine – although serious doubts remain over Sanghamitta’s early commitment, since she apparently went on to marry a husband and bear him a son, both of whom followed her into the Sangha.

  In about 263 BCE Ashoka launched his att
ack on Kalinga, the only significant kingdom within the subcontinent that had resisted his father. With Kalinga’s subjugation and the effective subordination of the remaining unconquered territory to the south, Ashoka could now regard himself as ruler of all India, truly an emperor and more powerful than either his father or his grandfather had ever been. A Pax Ashokanica then descended on the subcontinent, which enjoyed an unbroken peace for the next three decades. Nothing like it would occur again in India until the Pax Britannica of the British Raj.13

  But as RE 13 at Girnar, Kalsi, Shahbazgarhi, Mansehra and Erragudi proclaims, the brutality of the conquest of Kalinga had a devastating impact both on the people of Kalinga and on Ashoka himself. It may have taken him two or three years to accept this fact and act upon it, but the Kalinga war does indeed seem to have been a tipping point, the decisive factor that turned him from a nominal lay Buddhist into a devout one and a pacifist – a genuine case of the convert finding refuge in the Dharma, as Buddhists like to put it. From this time onwards the emperor directed all his efforts into forging a system of government based on a new morality loosely based on the Buddhist interpretation of Dharma.

  This new agenda was only possible because of Kalinga and the terror it inspired. And yet the fact remains that in the process of graduating from king to emperor of all India, Priyadasi ceased to be Ashoka the Wrathful and became Ashoka Dharma, a transformation without precedent and of such breathtaking originality that it was bound to fail.

  The first of Emperor Ashoka’s public pronouncements went up three years after Kalinga, about 260 BCE, in the form of his Minor Rock Edicts. In them the emperor required it to be known that he was now a committed lay Buddhist, had visited the Sangha and that the gods and men had drawn closer thanks to his endeavours. What these endeavours were he did not spell out, but he desired all his subjects to do the same, and to this end he was making this announcement wherever he went on tour, these words to be inscribed on rocks and pillars wherever available.

  We may imagine this royal tour moving across the landscape like an advancing army: the emperor and royal family surrounded by an inner cordon of courtiers, officials, household staff and female bodyguards, with an outer ring made up of thousands of camp-followers and troops; a vast tented camp springing up at each new location, its inhabitants exhausting each region’s resources before moving on. Like all good monarchs, Ashoka made himself available to his subjects, but his spoken words can only have been heard by a privileged few. Ashoka wanted them to be heard by all – and for those words to endure. Hence his need for a written language and a medium that would survive.

  Ashoka’s own spoken tongue of Prakrit, the spoken language of Magadha, was now set down in a newly formalised alphabet designed to give it better expression than Kharosthi. It was still less than perfect, so that when after centuries of oblivion the value of each character was once more understood, the exact meaning of the words they spelled out would remain tantalisingly ambiguous. Yet these words are unmistakably those of an autocrat not quite sure what he is trying to say but determined to say it, dictated to a scribe who dare not question them. They may have come straight from the heart, but they are naive, incoherent and egotistical.

  The emperor’s early reference to pillars and rocks shows that both were employed from the start, even if only the latter have survived – unless we include another early set of Ashokan edicts: the so-called Schism Edicts. These are undated but the no-nonsense manner in which Ashoka takes it upon himself to tell the Sangha’s monks and nuns how to behave, what to wear and what to read makes it plain that he saw himself as head of the Buddhist Church in the manner of Henry VIII in Tudor England. These Schism Edicts provide the earliest documented evidence of the growing divisions within the Buddhist Sangha that would lead to its fragmentation into eighteen different schools and the great divide between the Northern and Southern traditions.

  From this point onwards Ashoka’s public life became increasingly focused on how to express his Buddhist faith and how best to support the Buddhist Church. The touring he refers to in his Minor Rock Edicts may refer to the first of at least two pilgrimages to the holy places of Buddhism, made under the guidance of a senior elder of the Buddhist Sangha. But which elder? Readers of the Great Dynastic Chronicle are left in no doubt that the dominant figure in Ashoka’s religious life was the elder Moggaliputta Tissa of the Sthaviravada (later Therevada) school of Buddhism, some of whose ashes were recovered by General Cunningham at Sanchi. However, in the Legend of King Ashoka the book’s great hero is Upagupta, the dominant figure of the rival Sarvastivadas school of Mathura (later Mahayana). Just to confuse the issue further, the Tibetan historian Taranatha puts forward his candidate: the elder Yashah, abbot of the Kukkutarama, or ‘Cock’ monastery, outside Pataliputra, also known as the Ashokarama, founded and funded by Ashoka. Yashah is patently not Upagupta, who in the same text has died long before Ashoka is born. Indeed, Upagupta does seem to be the intruder here, resurrected to give greater authority to the Mahayana case. These contradictory accounts point to bitter in-fighting within the Buddhist community as each faction sought to place its dogmas and practices at the heart of the emperor’s established church.

  It is possible to pick a path through this religious minefield with the help of the Ashokan edicts, the second tranche of which began to appear in about 259 BCE, probably starting in the conquered territories of Kalinga and working north from there – although it remains a mystery why no Rock Edict has ever been found in the Gangetic basin. The best guess is that such edicts did go up in that region, inscribed on pillars rather than rocks, and that none have survived.

  The great advance between the Minor Rock Edicts and the Rock Edicts is summed up in the word Dharma. It appears in the first sentence of the first Rock Edict, to be repeated many times thereafter. It had now become the bedrock of Ashoka’s political philosophy, and a strategy for the propagation of Dharma had now been worked out, involving the specially created cadre of religious administrators-cum-commissars: the Dharma Mahamatras, charged with spreading the Dharma and promoting the moral welfare of the people.

  A new tone can be heard in the Rock Edicts. As the opening phrase of every edict made clear, the emperor is still very much in charge, but he wants people to know how he had changed, and not simply in relation to the remorse he felt about Kalinga. Perhaps for the first time in his life Ashoka has begun to understand the real meaning of humility, to the extent that he feels obliged to tell his subjects of the efforts being made to improve the way state business is transacted and how he himself attends to it. ‘Truly I consider the welfare of all to be my duty’, he tells his subjects, ‘and the root of this is exertion and the prompt despatch of business. There is no better work than promoting the welfare of all the people.’14

  It was now twelve or thirteen years since his anointing and Emperor Ashoka was approaching his mid-forties. He had committed his government to a revolutionary programme of social and religious reform that struck at the heart of the old order. It had three main goals: non-violence as a means of achieving ends, allowing conquest by Dharma only; freedom of religious expression with respect for the views of others; and the promotion of the ‘essentials of all religions’ based on proper behaviour, consisting of purity of heart, self-control, firm devotion, respect for each other, generosity, good deeds, gratitude, restraint, impartiality, not injuring or harming others, and forgiving those who do wrong ‘where forgiveness is possible’.

  This was not Dharma as understood by the Buddhists – or by Brahmans, for that matter. There was no specific reference either to Sakyamuni or to the Sangha as the source of this Dharma. And with good reason, for the Rock Edicts were directed at the entire nation and not exclusively at the Buddhist community, in line with Ashoka’s declaration that all men were his children. This would explain why they contain moral rather than religious precepts. The only reference to gods is in Ashoka’s own regnal name and title, and the only time he mentions religious ceremonies it is in
a distinctly negative context, when in RE 2 he refers to ‘vulgar and worthless ceremonies’. Even though Ashoka repeatedly calls for the Brahman caste to be shown respect, that phrase must surely have rankled in Brahmanical circles, for who else could it have been aimed at?

  Neither here nor in the later edicts is there any reference to the massive stupa-building programme ascribed to Ashoka in the Southern tradition, said to have been completed within three years. One explanation is that this took place between the cutting of the Rock Edicts in about 259–258 BCE and the erection of the Pillar Edicts in 243–242 BCE. That stupa and monastery building on a subcontinental scale did indeed take place is unquestionable, supported by the remains of hundreds of Buddhist monastic settlements built around stupas scattered across India and extending deep into Afghanistan, as far west as Herat. These ruins show mostly Kushan or Gupta stupas, but in many cases they overlie rudimentary Mauryan structures. There is no denying the existence of a stupa cult within early Buddhism that underwent a dramatic expansion at the time of Ashoka.

  Before Ashoka no religious structure had been constructed of anything other than wood and mud and plaster, and now structures of bricks and mortar and stone were springing up all over the land. This sudden transformation of the religious landscape of India must have had a profound impact, for whatever may have been Ashoka’s intentions, the message these buildings conveyed was unmistakable. It was not the universal Dharma of the Rock Edicts that was being promoted here, but the Dharma of Buddhism.

  Ashoka’s stupa cult went hand in hand with Bodhi-tree worship and Wheel of the Moral Law worship. As soon as the first sculptures appear on Buddhist monuments these three symbols are displayed as quintessential icons of the Buddhist faith, all three owing their predominance in Buddhist iconography to Ashoka. Tree worship and the closely allied worship of fertility goddesses had always been an important element of Indian folk religion but was now given new importance thanks to Emperor Ashoka’s increasing fixation on the Bodhi tree at Bodhgaya in the last years of his rule. As for the Wheel of the Moral Law, how was this to be understood by non-Buddhists – as a symbol of the Vedic pan-Indian Dharma or as Sakyamuni Buddha’s Dharma? In promoting the one Ashoka was subverting the universality of the other.