by John Keay
I need not observe that it became a matter of primary interest to find some clue to the discovery of the missing portion of the rock on the eastern side, as the highly important eighteenth edict, containing the names of Ptolemy etc., had principally suffered from the mutilation. All our enquiries led to the conclusion that the rock had been blasted to furnish materials for the neighbouring causeway; to remove & this would have been attended with an expense which I did not feel myself authorized in incurring but the whole soil at the base of the rock was dug up to a considerable distance and as deep as could be gone.
In this way two or three inscribed fragments were found. But it was impossible to decide where they came from. Postans had to rest content with his vastly improved facsimiles of the rock itself and these were duly sent off to Calcutta. They arrived in early November 1838, just a day after a ship called the Hertfordshire had sailed away down the Hughli. On board was James Prinsep, demented and dying.
While wrestling with the first transcriptions from Dhauli and Girnar, he had fought off headaches and sickness. Rapidly the illness developed into ‘an affectation of the brain’. By the time he was bundled aboard the Hertfordshire, ‘his mind was addled’. He reached England but never recovered his sanity, dying a year later at the age of forty.
“That he was a great man, it would not perhaps be strictly correct to assert,’ wrote a friend and obituarist (he was probably thinking of Jones with whom Prinsep was so often compared). ‘But he was one of the most useful and talented men that England has yet given to India.’ His genius lay not so much in his scholarship as in his tenacity, ‘his burning, irrepressible enthusiasm’. Ultimately it proved his undoing, for his obsessive dedication to the Indian scripts had both unhinged his mind and wrecked his physique. But it had also gained for him, and for the study of India’s past, a new band of determined scholars. ‘We felt as if he observed and watched over us,’ wrote one. And, of course, it led him, perhaps drove him, to the solution of India’s greatest historical enigma.
One of his last achievements had been two carefully engraved plates showing the development of each letter of the modern Devanagari script from its origin in the Ashoka Brahmi. He illustrated nine distinct stages and gave a date to each. This was of immense value to philologists and constituted a worthy and succinct summary of his life’s work. Though since added to and qualified, it remains the basis for a study of India’s scripts. But, as Prinsep fully appreciated, it had a still more important aspect. ‘The table furnishes a curious species of palaeo-graphic chronometer by which any ancient inscription may be consigned with considerable accuracy to the period at which it was written, even though it possesses no actual date.’ It was, in effect, a ready reckoner not only for inscriptions but also for the monuments on which they were found. And since almost every building in India contains some inscription he had thus casually opened the way to a new and even more dramatic branch of Indology, the systematic study of Indian architecture.
But of more immediate significance was his unveiling of Ashoka. Hitherto all contact with ancient India had seemed impossibly vague. The great classical civilization hinted at by the glories of Sanskrit literature could be viewed only at about three removes – in translations of minor classical authors relaying information gleaned many centuries before by Megasthenes on his, probably brief, visit to north India. It was rather like trying to make out the history of the Plantagenets with nothing more to go on than a modern historical romance. Now, suddenly, it was like coming into possession of the text of the Magna Carta. In Ashoka here at last was a genuine historical figure, an emperor – apparently one of the most influential and powerful — whose very words expressing the rationale of his rule had been miraculously preserved.
From the mention of contemporary rulers like Ptolemy and Antiochus, his dates – about 269 to 232 BC – are more certain than those of any other Indian king before AD 1000. We know that his capital was Pataliputra (Patna) and that his empire stretched from Orissa to the Khyber Pass and from the Himalayas to at least as far south as Madras. Within this vast area there were independent tribes in the forests and hills as indeed remained the case until British times. They must have represented a real threat, since Ashoka seems to have adopted a firm if not repressive policy towards them. In other respects, his edicts favour tolerance and passivism. In the early years of his reign he had waged war in Orissa. The bloodshed and horrors of this campaign caused him to forswear further aggression. Whether he was actually a Buddhist monk or whether he even understood Buddhist theology is doubtful. But there is no question that the result of his conversion was an unwavering commitment to the ethics of that most humane and endearing religion.
“The greatest and noblest ruler India has known’, according to Professor Basham, he was ‘indeed one of the great kings of the world&. Ashoka towers above the other kings of ancient India, if for no other reason than that he is the only one among them whose personality can be constructed with any degree of certainty.’ It is this personal dimension that makes Ashoka so intriguing. His disapproval of any non-religious jollifications, and the austerity and directness of his language, suggest a Cromwellian puritanism – and yet he seems so typically Indian; vegetarianism, non-violence, reverence for life in all forms, tolerance to men of other religions were as important to Ashoka as to Mahatma Gandhi. The building of rest houses and the planting of trees along the highways were measures which recommended themselves to many of India’s great rulers, including the Moghuls and the British. And then there was what, by western standards, can only be called the naivety of Ashoka. To Christians the idea of moral reform on a world scale is irrevocably tied up with the ideas of sacrifice, suffering and persecution. But for Ashoka, as for most Indian reformers, regeneration springs from within and can be spread by conviction, precept and example. Like the Buddha, Ashoka’s conversion stemmed from a renunciation; like the Mahatma, he directed his appeal at something deep within the Indian soul.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Legacy of Pout
The hill of Sanchi, source of the short inscriptions which gave Prinsep the key to breaking the Ashoka script, is one of the loveliest archaeological sites. Miles from anywhere, in the dead centre of the Indian subcontinent, the hill rises gently from a sea of scrubby jungle, the haunt of tigers and aboriginal tribesmen. On its flat summit the architectural shapes are weird and unfamiliar; the very silence suggests extreme antiquity. Yet it prompts no quavering of the spirit like the austere dawn-of-creation ruggedness of Stonehenge, nor that flutter of the emotions evoked by the chaste lines of the Parthenon or the scented splendour of the Taj. Instead there is a soothing sense of peace, and, despite the wilderness setting, an overwhelming impression of civilization. For more than a thousand years Sanchi was a cherished centre of worship, learning, art and trade. The panels of sculptural relief that cover the gateways portray the Buddha’s life and Buddhist history in crowded, bustling scenes. All creation seems to be represented, all human moods portrayed. No written work of history could possibly convey so vividly the reality of civilized society two millennia ago.
Yet, if the atmosphere is almost tangible, the setting and the buildings defy description. The first man to attempt an account of what he called ‘the Ancient and Remarkable Building near Bhilsa’ was Captain E. Fell. He had made the sixty-mile trek out from Bhopal in 1819 on the recommendation of a friend. Doubtless he had some idea of what to expect; and he was far from disappointed. But how to convey to the readers of the Calcutta Journal some idea of even the main stupa, or tower?
On a tableland of a detached hill & is an ancient fabric of a hemispherical form, built of thin layers of free-stone, in the nature of steps, without any cement and, to all appearances, solid; the outside of which has been faced throughout with a coat of chunam mortar & The monument (for such I will call it) is strengthened by a buttress of stone masonry, twelve feet high and seven broad, all around the base, the measured circumference of which is 554 feet.
It was re
ally a sort of circular pyramid, and Fell thought that it might not in fact be solid. If there were any hidden chambers they might prove ‘highly interesting and worthy of being examined’.
The monument is surrounded by a colonnade of granite pillars, ten feet high, distant from each other a foot and a half, connected by parallels also granite, of an elliptical form, united by tenons & At the East, West and North points are gateways [the south gateway had already collapsed], plain parallelograms, the extreme height of each of which is forty feet and the breadth within the perpendiculars nine feet.
It was as if Buddhist architects had been determined to do everything the hard way. Where several small stones would do the job of one big one they chose the one big one. They whittled temples out of rock, erected pillars that looked as if they had been turned on a lathe, and here they were again treating sandstone as if it were wood. The rails of the colonnade were jointed to the uprights by mortice and tenon, and the lintels of the great gateways were shaped as if to anticipate bowing.
But Fell, like every subsequent visitor, was soon absorbed by the carving.
The perpendiculars of the gateways are divided into four almost equal compartments. In the lower are statues of door-keepers & In another compartment is a representation of the monument [the stupa] surrounded by figures in groups, some standing, others sitting cross-legged, others bowing, all with joined hands, and in the act of worship & In another is a small convex body in a boat, the prow of which is a lion’s head and the stern the expanded tail of a fish, over which is suspended a long cable. In the boat are three male figures, two of whom are rowing and the third holding an umbrella over the convex. The vessel is in an open sea, in the midst of a tempest; near it are figures swimming and endeavouring by seizing piles to save themselves from drowning. One, on the point of drowning, is making an expiring effort to ascend the side; the features of all fully portray their melancholy situation. In another compartment is the sacred tree and altar, surrounded by groups of figures, both male and female, some beating tympans, others playing cymbals, others dancing; & in short it is hardly possible to conceive sculpture more expressive of feeling than this.
Fell did his best; but how could someone ‘inexperienced in the power of description,’ give even a very faint idea of the magnificence of such stupendous structures and exquisitely finished sculpture? He was not even sure to what religion the site belonged. The hill-top was strewn with statues. He thought he had recognized Brahma of the Hindus and Parasnath of the Jains, but the predominant figure was certainly the Buddha. If Sanchi was Buddhist though, where were the Buddha’s followers today?
The answer was almost everywhere – Ladakh, Nepal, Tibet, China, Burma, Thailand and Ceylon – except India. Buddhism encircled the subcontinent, but in India it was unknown. To Jones and his colleagues, immersed in their Sanskrit studies, it had looked as if Hinduism must have pre-empted the country. Stupas were thought to have been dedicated to the Hindu god, Siva, and to have been inspired by the Egyptians. ‘Whether Buddha was a sage or a hero,’ wrote Francis Wilford, ‘the founder of a colony or a whole colony personified, whether & black or fair’, he was assuredly ‘either an Egyptian or an Ethiopian’. Jones agreed. He identified Sakyasinha, one of the Buddha’s epithets, with the Egyptian god Sesostris. But he also subscribed to the widely held belief that Buddha was just another name for the Norse god Woden, who in turn was Mercury of the Romans. Buddha was the son of Maya and Mercury the son of Maia. And there was an even simpler equation; Wednesday, or Wodenstag, of Germanic languages was Buddhwar, or Buddha’s day, of Sanskrit languages and also Mercredi, or Mercurii dies of Latin languages.
This sort of speculation went on well into the nineteenth century. It was only from non-Indian sources that gradually a true and wholly unexpected picture of the origins of Buddhism emerged. William Chambers, the man who had first reported on the boulder temples of Mahabalipuram, read a French account of Thailand and made the important identification of the Thai god, known as Pout or Codom, with the Ceylonese deity known as Buddha or Gautam. He also suggested that this Pout or Codom had once been worshipped in parts of India. This was borne out by Francis Buchanan, a naturalist and surveyor, who visited Burma in the late 1790s. He made a useful study of Buddhist ritual there as well as reporting that the Buddha had been an Indian from Bihar.
Ten years later Buchanan’s surveying actually took him to Bihar: it was not long before he found further evidence. At Boddh Gaya, the name of which was a clue in itself, he declared that the extensive ruins, including the pyramidal temple, were clearly Buddhist in origin. Statues of the Buddha were scattered through the neighbourhood to a radius of fifteen miles and were now objects of worship to the Hindus. Indeed the temple itself was now in the charge of Brahmins. But they admitted to being puzzled by its origins. Every now and then strange visitors from far-off lands would descend on them and reverently tour the overgrown ruins with ancient books in their hands. Only the previous year, 1811, one such, ‘a man of some rank with several attendants [who] came from a country called Tamsa-dwip-maha-amarapura-paigu’ had arrived out of the blue. He claimed that the place had once been the residence of Gautama and that the temple was built by ‘Dharma Ashoka, king of Pandaripuk’. Buchanan knew that Gautama was the Buddha and correctly identified the strangers as from Burma; but Ashoka and Pandaripuk (Pataliputra) meant nothing to him. Neither did he realize that Boddh Gaya was venerated, not as the residence of the Buddha, but as the place of his enlightenment.
It was not till the 1820s that Buddhist studies really got off the ground. Brian Hodgson had visited Sanchi soon after Captain Fell. His curiosity was aroused and, as the lone British representative in Kathmandu, he resolved to take advantage of his unique position in a still partly Buddhist country. ‘Although the regular investigation of such a subject was foreign to my pursuits, [I commenced] a full and accurate investigation of this almost unknown subject.’ The Nepalese monks were far from co-operative, but Hodgson soon accumulated a horde of Buddhist scriptures and then found ‘an old Buddha residing in the city of Patan’ who was willing to divulge some of the sect’s secrets. Hodgson drew up a detailed questionnaire and, on the basis of the old man’s answers, prepared a sketch of Buddhist beliefs. But when he proceeded to compare the results of the questionnaire with the textual evidence, he almost gave up. ‘I began to feel my want of languages, and (to confess the truth) of patience.’
His collection of manuscripts was getting out of hand. It was already the largest hoard in existence and included two copies of the Tibetan encyclopaedia of sacred learning, which runs to 367 volumes, each of more than 100,000 leaves and each leaf about two feet long. Donated by the trunkload to the libraries of London, Paris and Calcutta, this collection was destined to provide the foundation for all future Buddhist studies. But Hodgson’s immediate problem was that there seemed to be considerable divergence between Buddhism as now practised and traditional Buddhism as revealed in the texts. Even on the subject of the Buddha’s birthplace there was no agreement; ‘but all the places named are Indian’. Clearly both doctrine and practice had undergone a long process of change. On the other hand it was interesting that Buddhism, like Hinduism, was still a living religion and a thriving culture. To scholars used to the idea that all classical civilizations were dead civilizations, it came as a revelation that in Asia they tended to be still going strong. One really could study the past through the present. Jones himself had been struck by the idea that it was like discovering an enclave of Greeks who still spoke ancient Greek, read their Homer and consulted the Delphic oracle. Hodgson, with his questionnaire, was exploiting this situation. He was, for instance, able to provide a guide to the stylistic conventions used in sculptures of the Buddha. And he furnished an engraving of a modern Nepalese stupa which was clearly a descendant of Sanchi’s.
Meanwhile, far away in the western extremity of the Himalayas, another scholar, in rather different circumstances, was poring over the sacred texts of the Tibetans. Alexand
er Czoma de Koros had originally armed himself with a stout stick and set off to walk from his native Hungary to China. In 1822, two years and several thousand miles later, he ran into William Moorcroft, the legendary explorer of the Western Himalayas. Moorcroft had travelled in Tibet and was deeply attracted to Buddhism. He urged de Koros to take up the study of the Tibetan texts and provided him with the limited funds he needed (de Koros lived off Tibetan tea, and his only possessions were a single change of clothes). Moorcroft then headed for Afghanistan and promptly disappeared; but, thanks to the intervention of the Asiatic Society, de Koros continued to receive a frugal stipend. In the cliff-top monasteries of Ladakh and Kinnaur he sat cross-legged through the cruel Himalayan winters, oblivious of all but the text before him. He compiled the first-ever Tibetan dictionary and grammar and began to make important contributions to the elucidation of the Buddhist mysteries.
With Hodgson and de Koros able to provide textual interpretations, archaeological discoveries came into their own. In the early 1820s the British representative at Bhopal, Henry Maddock, inspired by Fell’s hint that there might be hidden chambers in the Sanchi stupas, attempted to open the Great Stupa. If it was indeed a pyramid of some sort it might contain treasure, or at least some clue to its origin and purpose. But Maddock was disappointed. The stupa did not consist of sealed chambers, but was indeed a solid mass of masonry. He retired with nothing to show for his labours but a gaping hole in one side of the monument, a mound of rubble, another collapsed gateway, and a lasting reputation as one of the raj’s vandals.
Inspired by no nobler motives, a further attempt was made to explore a stupa in 1830. This time the would-be tomb-robber was one of a band of ex-Napoleonic officers now serving under the independent rajah of the Punjab, Ranjit Singh. The stupa in question was a lofty domed edifice at Manikyala, near Rawalpindi, in what is now Pakistan. Encamped in the vicinity with no obvious employment for his soldiery, General Ventura directed them to dig into the ruin. A British mission twenty years earlier had thought it might be Greek; it was worth investigating. Like Maddock, Ventura first tried to excavate a hole in the side and succeeded only in collapsing vast quantities of rubble. But, with time and unlimited labour, he adopted a different approach and started burrowing down from the top of the dome. Only three feet down, he found his first coins. More followed at intervals, and then came small compartments containing cylindrical boxes and canisters of gold and copper in which were scraps of material, jewellery and more coins.