In the twenty-six years since my coronation prisoners have been given amnesty on twenty-five occasions.
6
Beloved-of-the-Gods speaks thus: Twelve years after my coronation I started to have Dharma edicts written for the welfare and happiness of the people, and so that not transgressing them they might grow in the Dharma. Thinking, ‘How can the welfare and happiness of the people be secured?’ I give attention to my relatives, to those dwelling near and those dwelling far, so I can lead them to happiness and then I act accordingly. I do the same for all groups. I have honoured all religions with various honours. But I consider it best to meet with people personally.
This Dharma edict was written twenty-six years after my coronation.
7
Beloved-of-the-Gods speaks thus: In the past kings desired that the people might grow through the promotion of the Dharma. But despite this, people did not grow through the promotion of the Dharma. Beloved-of-the-Gods, King Piyadasi, said concerning this: ‘It occurs to me that in the past kings desired that the people might grow through the promotion of the Dharma. But despite this, people did not grow through the promotion of the Dharma. Now how can the people be encouraged to follow it? How can the people be encouraged to grow through the promotion of the Dharma? How can I elevate them by promoting the Dharma?’ Beloved-of-the-Gods, King Piyadasi, further said concerning this: ‘It occurs to me that I shall have proclamations on Dharma announced and instruction on Dharma given. When people hear these, they will follow them, elevate themselves and grow considerably through the promotion of the Dharma.’ It is for this purpose that proclamations on Dharma have been announced and various instructions on Dharma have been given and that officers who work among many promote and explain them in detail. The Rajjukas who work among hundreds of thousands of people have likewise been ordered: ‘In this way and that encourage those who are devoted to Dharma.’ Beloved-of-the-Gods speaks thus: ‘Having this object in view, I have set up Dharma pillars, appointed Dharma Mahamatras, and announced Dharma proclamations.’
Beloved-of-the-Gods, King Piyadasi, says: Along roads I have had banyan trees planted so that they can give shade to animals and men, and I have had mango groves planted. At intervals of eight krosas, I have had wells dug, rest-houses built, and in various places I have had watering-places made for the use of animals and men. But these are but minor achievements. Such things to make the people happy have been done by former kings. I have done these things for this purpose, that the people might practise the Dharma.
Beloved-of-the-Gods, King Piyadasi, speaks thus: My Dharma Mahamatras too are occupied with various good works among the ascetics and householders of all religions. I have ordered that they should be occupied with the affairs of the Sangha. I have also ordered that they should be occupied with the affairs of the Brahmans and the Ajivikas. I have ordered that they be occupied with the Niganthas. In fact, I have ordered that different Mahamatras be occupied with the particular affairs of all different religions. And my Dharma Mahamatras likewise are occupied with these and other religions.
Beloved-of-the-Gods, King Piyadasi, speaks thus: These and other principal officers are occupied with the distribution of gifts, mine as well as those of the queens. In my women’s quarters, they organise various charitable activities here and in the provinces. I have also ordered my sons and the sons of other queens to distribute gifts so that noble deeds of Dharma and the practice of Dharma may be promoted. And noble deeds of Dharma and the practice of Dharma consist of having kindness, generosity, truthfulness, purity, gentleness and goodness increase among the people.
Beloved-of-the-Gods, King Piyadasi, speaks thus: Whatever good deeds have been done by me, those the people accept and those they follow. Therefore they have progressed and will continue to progress by being respectful to mother and father, respectful to elders, by courtesy to the aged and proper behaviour towards Brahmans and ascetics, towards the poor and distressed, and even towards servants and employees.
Beloved-of-the-Gods, King Piyadasi, speaks thus: This progress among the people through Dharma has been done by two means, by Dharma regulations and by persuasion. Of these, Dharma regulation is of little effect, while persuasion has much more effect. The Dharma regulations I have given are that various animals must be protected. And I have given many other Dharma regulations also. But it is by persuasion that progress among the people through Dharma has had a greater effect in respect of harmlessness to living beings and non-killing of living beings.
Concerning this, Beloved-of-the-Gods says: Wherever there are stone pillars or stone slabs, there this Dharma edict is to be engraved so that it may long endure. It has been engraved so that it may endure as long as my sons and great-grandsons live and as long as the sun and the moon shine, and so that people may practise it as instructed. For by practising it happiness will be attained in this world and the next.
This Dharma edict has been written by me twenty-seven years after my coronation.
Notes
Prakrit, meaning ‘ordinary’, is the name given to a group of Indo-Iranian vernacular languages from which both Pali and Sanskrit emerged as ‘classical’ languages restricted by caste and religion. The dominant form of Prakrit was that spoken across the Gangetic plains centred on the ancient kingdom of Magadha. This became the lingua franca of the subcontinent with regional variations.
Sanskrit is a classical form of Prakrit, its structure probably formalised in the fourth century BCE by the grammarian Panini, who refined the archaic Vedic Sanskrit of an earlier age to make it more cultured. Hindus, Jains and (originally) Buddhists considered Sanskrit to be a language of the gods, and thus a sacred language exclusive to the Brahman priestly caste.
Pali originated as a sophisticated form of Prakrit, probably that spoken by the educated classes in the Magadhan region at the time of Sakyamuni Buddha and his contemporary the Jain teacher Mahavira, so that when the canonical texts of the Buddhists and Jains came to be written down in the first–second century CE they were first set down in Pali. It was most probably formalised at or just before the time of Ashoka, afterwards becoming the sacred language of the Theravada or Southern tradition of Buddhism, centred on the island of Tamraparni, Singhala or Lanka (afterwards Ceylon and now Sri Lanka). Within India, however, Pali was supplanted by Sanskrit as a sacred language, and it was in Sanskrit form that the Buddhist sacred texts were exported into Tibet and along the Silk Road to China and beyond.
The Kharosthi script was developed by the Gandharans in what is today the Afghan–Pakistan border region to write not only their own Gandhari language but Prakrit. It was almost certainly developed and applied before the Brahmi alphabet was invented in India proper, most probably but not verifiably at the time of Ashoka’s grandfather Chandragupta. It has obvious links with the Aramaic alphabet that entered the Gandharan region following the Achaemenid conquest but was conceived to better express the sounds of the Prakrit languages.
The Brahmi alphabet has been described as the ancestor of most of the alphabets of South-East Asia. Despite claims that proto-Brahmi writing dating back to the sixth century BCE has been found in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, the general consensus today is that the Brahmi alphabet was formalised at about the time of Emperor Ashoka, possibly from a pre-existing script, but devised to give written expression to Prakrit speech and was intended to be an improvement on the Kharosthi script used in Gandhara and the Upper Punjab. Like Kharosthi, Brahmi is a script in which each letter of the alphabet represents a consonant preceding the vowel ‘a’, the other vowels being represented through diacritical marks added to the consonants. Its early usage appears to have been restricted initially to royal edicts and royal donors’ inscriptions on religious structures.
For the full picture see Professor Richard Salomon’s masterly Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the other Indo-Aryan Languages, 1998.
Preface. The King Without Sorrow
1 Buil
t in the form of a giant chariot drawn by horses, the Surya temple at Konarak was erected by Raja Narasimhadeva in the thirteenth century to mark his victory over the forces of darkness, with the Buddhist elephant represented as a malign beast crushing man in his trunk. Pockets of Buddhism survived in what was then Kalinga and is now Orissa longer than anywhere else in India before its final extinction in the thirteenth century.
2 In his book Orientalism, published in 1978, Said argued that these Orientalists were inspired not by the new spirit of enquiry central to the European Enlightenment but by an intellectual imperialism that sought to control and contain subject peoples and to objectify them. Said’s Orientalism has since been thoroughly discredited. See, for example, Robert Irwin, The Lust for Knowing: the Orientalists and the Enemies, 2006, and Ibn Warraq, Defending the West: a Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism, 2007. For a wider take on the debate in the Indian context see Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India, 2006.
3 Max Deeg, ‘From the Iron-Wheel to Bodhisattvahood: Aoka in Buddhist Culture and Memory’, Aoka in History and Historical Memory, Ed. P. Olivelle, 2009.
Chapter 1. The Breaking of Idols
1 Sadr-ud-din Muhammad Hasan Nizami, Taj-ul-Masr, in Sir Henry Elliot and John Dowson, History of India as Told By its Own Historians, 1867–77, Vol. II.
2 Minkaj-ud-din, Tabakat-i-Nasiri: a General History of the Muhammadan Dynasties of Asia, including Hindustan; from A.H.194 (810 A.D.) to A.H.658 (1260 A.D.) and the irruption of the infidel Mughals into Islam, Vol. I, trans. H. G. Raverty, 1880.
3 Sir Henry Elliot and John Dowson, History of India as Told By its Own Historians, Vol. II, 1867–77.
4 The last known eyewitness of the fate of Nalanda was a Tibetan monk named Dharmaswamin. Arriving at Nalanda in the year 1235, he found just one survivor, a ninety-year-old monk named Rahul Sribhandra who was teaching a small class of acolytes from a Sanskrit grammar – the only manuscript to have survived the great fire. Dharmaswamin stayed on to study, only for the class to break up in panic when it was reported that Turk raiders were heading their way. Dharmaswamin carried his elderly teacher into hiding, and when the two returned to Nalanda they found the rest of the class had fled. Having taught Dharmaswamin all he knew, the aged monk handed him his copy of the Sanskrit grammar and told him to return to Tibet.
5 The first fire was Julius Caesar’s accidental burning of the city in the Alexandrian War of 48 BCE. There were then two episodes of anti-pagan pogroms, initiated by the Christian patriarchs Theophilus and his nephew Cyril in about 390 and 410 CE. Finally there was the Arab sack of the city in 642 CE, when the last of the great library’s books were used for fuel by the general Amr ibn al-As – supposedly, by order of Caliph Omar on the grounds that if they agreed with the word of God they were superfluous and if they did not they were heretical. The fairest account of the destruction of the Ptolemaic Royal Library at Alexandria is to be found in James Hannan’s Bede’s Library. The Arab sack of the library has been questioned ever since Edward Gibbon, in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, heaped all the blame on the thirteenth-century anti-Muslim Christian Bishop Gregory Bar Hebraeus. However, this does not explain how the earlier Arab traveller Abd-ul-Latif al-Baghdadi, writing before Hebraeus in 1231, was able to refer in passing to Caliph Omar’s ordering of the destruction of the library in his Account of Egypt. See also Professor Bernard Lewis’s letter ‘The Vanished Library’ in the New York Review of Books, 27 September 1990, where he suggests that this may have been an anti-Shia canard started by Saladin.
Chapter 2. The Golden Column of Firoz Shah
1 The pillar probably came from Kangra in the Western Himalayas. It carries a six-line inscription in Gupta Brahmi stating that it was erected on a mountain named Vishnupada by a king named Chandra who conquered Bengal and the Upper Punjab, probably Chandragupta II. It has to be said that this version of events contradicts the popular version in all the guidebooks, which is that Qutb built his mosque over a Hindu temple (quite possible) and around a standing Vishnu pillar (highly unlikely, given his religious orthodoxy). The late John Irwin of the V&A has written extensively and controversially on this subject in such essays as ‘Islam and the Cosmic Pillar’.
2 Shams-i Siraj ‘Afif, Tarikh-i Firoz Shahi, in Sir Henry Elliot and John Dowson, History of India as Told By Its Own Historians, 1867–77, Vol. III.
3 Sirat-i Firoz Shahi, quoted in Harry Falk, Aokan Sites and Artefacts: a Source-Book with Bibliography, 2006.
4 Quoted by Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus; or, Purchas his pilgrimes, 1625, ed. W. Foster, 1905–7.
5 As translated by the late Dr S. M. Askari, whose translation of the Sirat-i-Firoz Shahi, edited by Dr Ahmad, is to be published shortly.
6 The most complete account of these and other Ashokan columns is given in Harry Falk, Aokan Sites and Artefacts, 2006.
7 Timur, Malfuzat-I Timuri, in Sir Henry Elliot and John Dowson, History of India as Told By Its Own Historians, 1867–77, Vol. II.
8 William Finch in Samuel Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimes, 1613.
9 Shafaat Ahmad Khan, ed., John Marshall in India: Notes and Observations in India 1668–1672, 1927.
10 Sultan Qutb-ud-din Aybak’s hammer Muhammad Bakhtiyar in the fourteenth century, the Sharqi rulers of Jaunpur and Sikander Lodi in the fifteenth century, and Emperor Shah Jehan early in the seventeenth century.
11 Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Travels in India, translated from the original French of 1676 with a biographical sketch of the author, Notes, Appendices, etc., by V. Ball, ed. William Crooke, 2001.
12 The local historian was none other than James Prinsep, writing in his books of sketches Benares Illustrated, published in 1833. He was quite unaware that the lat was an Ashokan pillar.
13 H. R. Nevill, Banaras Gazeteer, 1909. The Varanasi Gazeteer of 1965 gives a very different and wholly unwarranted version of these events, playing down the religious differences between the two communities.
14 Bishop Reginald Heber, Journey though India, from Calcutta to Bombay with Notes upon Ceylon, 1828.
15 Padre Marco della Tomba, de Gubernatis, 1878, trans. Hosten 1812, quoted in Harry Falk, Aokan Sites and Artefacts, 2006.
16 M. Noti, Joseph Tiefenthaler, S.J., A Forgotten Geographer of India, 1906.
17 For more detail on William Jones’s Indian career see Charles Allen, The Buddha and the Sahibs: the Men who Discovered India’s Lost Religion, 2003; Dr Michael J. Franklin, Sir William Jones: a Critical Biography, 1997, and as editor, The European Discovery of India, 2007.
18 Sir William Jones, co-founder of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Letters, 1970. See also O. P. Kejariwal, The Asiatic Society of Bengal and the Discovery of India’s Past, 1988.
Chapter 3. Objects of Enquiry
1 Rudyard Kipling, ‘The City of Dreadful Night and Other Places’, 1892.
2 James Forbes, Oriental Memoirs, 1834.
3 Author unknown, Calcutta Review, Vol. VI, 1849.
4 Lord Teignmouth, Memoirs of the Life, Writings and Correspondence of Sir William Jones, 1804.
5 Sir William Jones to Charles Wilkins, 22 June 1784, The Letters of Sir William Jones, Vol. II, ed. G. Cannon, 1970. My thanks to Dr Michael Franklin for drawing my attention to this and to other aspects of Jones contained in his unpublished paper ‘And the Celt Knew the Indian: Sir William Jones 1746–94’, read at conference at Cardiff University on 25 May 2010.
6 Sir William Jones, ‘Asiatick Orthography’, AR, Vol. I, 1788; see also Kejariwal.
7 Sir William Jones, ‘On the Chronology of the Hindus’, AR, Vol. II, 1790.
8 Ill-health forced Law to quit India and he eventually settled down to farm near Washington in the United States of America.
9 Law’s paper was never published, but is referred to in James Prinsep, ‘Further particulars of the Sarun and Tirhut Laths, and account of two Bauddha Inscriptions found, the one at Bakhra, in Tirhut, the other at Sarnath,
near Benares’, JASB, Vol. IV, 1835.
10 John Harington, ‘A Description of a Cave near Gaya’, AR, Vol. I, 1788.
11 John Harrington had a stronger constitution than Law and he stayed on in Bengal, eventually retiring from India in 1822 to become President of the Board of Trade.
12 Robert Montgomery Martin, The British Colonies: British Possessions in Asia, Vol. XI, 1854.
13 The unfortunate Polier ran straight into the French Revolution and was stabbed to death by a mob. However, just before he left India in 1788 he sold half of his collection of five hundred Persian, Arabic and Sanskrit MSS to Edward Pote, Resident at Patna, who promptly donated most of them to his alma mater, Eton College.
14 Sir William Jones in a letter to Lieutenant William Steuart, Krishna-nagar, 13 September 1789, The Letters of Sir William Jones, Vol. II, ed. G. Cannon, 1970.
15 Sir Charles Ware Mallet, ‘Account of Some Ancient Inscriptions at Ellora’, AR, Vol.V, 1897.
16 Sir William Jones, ‘Fourth Anniversary Discourse’, delivered 15 February 1787 by the President, AR, Vol. II, 1790.
17 Sir William Jones, ‘On the Gods of Greece, Italy and India’, AR, Vol. I, 1788.
18 Henry Colebrooke, ‘On the Sanscrit and Pracrit Languages’, AR, Vol. VII, 1804.
19 Captain Wilford, ‘Of the Kings of Magad’ha; their Chronology’, AR, Vol. IX, 1807.
20 John Harrington, ‘Introductory Remarks, Intended to Have Accompanied Captain Mahony’s Paper on Ceylon’, AR, Vol. VII, 1804.
21 William Chambers, ‘Some Account of the Sculptures and Ruins at Mavalipuram’, AR, Vol. I, 1788.
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