ASHOKA’S EARLY DAYS AS KING

Interestingly, Ashoka might very well have suffered the same fate as his father, Bindusara, and been relegated to the shadows of history had it not been for some eminently serendipitous discoveries that are regularly—and marvellously—made by clever people and that pump fresh blood, as it were, into the discipline. It is not as if he was entirely forgotten through the ages but living on in scraps of public memory and exerting a sort of covert influence is not the same as bursting into the public realm as a real flesh-and-blood character, which he did when the key to his voice was unlocked by James Prinsep, epigraphist and ardent Indologist.

So how did the (re)discovery of Ashoka come about and what did it entail? As with all genuine historical findings, its roots lay way back in time but we can sort of pinpoint it to the reign of the Mughal emperor, Jahangir, in the seventeenth century. An English traveller named Thomas Coryat, who had, incredibly, walked from England to Delhi, glimpsed, in 1616, a gleaming sandstone pillar soaring over the ruins of the Firoz Shah Kotla complex that had been built by Firoz/Firuz Shah Tughlak of the Tughlak sultanate in Delhi. Examining it at close quarters, he presumed that the inscription on the pillar was in Greek and, therefore, precipitately concluded that it pertained to Alexander of Macedon.

Matters remained as they were until John Marshall, who worked with the British East India Company and was later destined to become pivotal to the historical sphere in India as the first director-general of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), spotted an inscribed pillar in Bihar with a carved lion as its capital. Similar pillars were discovered in Allahabad, Nepal and other places—and similar writing found carved on rock faces as far west as Gujarat and as far south as Mysore. Excitement began to grow in historical circles, as is usual when a deep mystery is sensed. To add to the general fervour, James Todd, who had discovered the Girnar rock inscriptions (cited earlier), described how the massive rock had been virtually converted into a book with the aid of an ‘iron pen’, each inscribed letter being almost two feet high.

It was rapidly becoming clear that these messages were connected with some royal personage who probably controlled many regions in India and even beyond. Frantic research commenced from all quarters but neither the Puranic lists of kings nor the corpus of deciphered epigraphic material seemed to fit this nameless ruler, who, additionally, was using a script of ‘pin men’ to say something, which had no relation to either Gupta Brahmi or Kutila, the two known scripts that were identified by scholars as early forms of Sanskrit. Attempting to flesh out a mysterious and elusive figure who did not use an intelligible form of communication, and who seemed as vague and insubstantial as a shadow, was a baffling and frustrating endeavour but there were many enthusiasts who plunged headlong into the task. Yet destiny is notoriously capricious in its conferral of achievements, as we know, and so to James Prinsep fell the honour, in this regard—although he was already standing on the shoulders of giants, such as William Jones, for one, whose stellar work on the chronology of Magadha, and the synchronicity between the Greek and Indian sources of the time, had already unlocked huge parts of the puzzle.

Arriving in India in 1819 as the Assistant Assay-Master of the Mint in Calcutta, Prinsep, a passionate scientist and inventor by training and inclination, instantly fell in love with the country and threw himself into the study of its past, while also designing sewers and bazaars, and an ingenious steam-powered mechanism to operate fans and musical organs—so that he could work and keep cool and enjoy music, at the same time—as well as using his artistic skills to capture his surroundings through a series of charming etchings (his delightful sketches on Banaras come to mind). While studying the coin collection of the Asiatic Society, of which he was a member, the ‘pin men’ caught his eye and he was fascinated, to put it mildly. Accordingly, he set in motion a mammoth enterprise—that of getting people across the country to make more tracings of similar inscriptions on rocks so that he could collate and study them. It was an eclectic crew that responded to his call, some of them being truly memorable—and idiosyncratic—personalities.

Take the case of Lieutenant Markham Kittoe who discovered an inscribed rock at Dhauli in Orissa in 1837. It seems he had had a skirmish with a bear, at an earlier point, and reached Dhauli only to find its fully-grown cubs staking claim to the area near the rock. Undaunted, Kittoe skulked about till dawn when he climbed to the rock and cut off two forked tree boughs so that he could stand on them to make his tracing of the inscription. The bears had presumably left by then but Kittoe had other woes in store for him. The bearer, whom he had tasked with keeping the boughs steady, fell asleep and slackened his hold whereupon Kittoe, absorbed in his task, made the cardinal mistake of forgetting his ‘ticklish footing’, lost his balance and pitched headlong down the Dhauli rock.

Fortunately for all concerned, he fell on his hands, receiving nothing more than a few bruises and a blow to his ego. Pausing to rest and reflect on the vagaries of fate—and, presumably, the animal kingdom—Kittoe then resumed his task, which was an inherently messy endeavour, involving smearing the rock face with printer’s ink or a red colour, pressing a thin cloth over it, letting it dry and then slowly peeling it off so as to carefully preserve the tracing. Not a job for the ham-handed, this one, but the only workable solution when dealing with gigantic rocks and pillars that were over forty feet tall!

Nevertheless, Prinsep was not always able to obtain clear tracings from his amateur historians. The pillars in question were often broken or the rocks had developed cracks and, what is more, the inscriptions themselves had been slowly but surely fading over time, a span that we now know to be over two thousand years. Also, not all these enthusiasts treated the evidence with the same respect and caution. Take the case of Walter Elliot who seems to have defaced the Jauguda Rock Edict near Bhuvaneshwar in Odisha that he initially found in a pristine condition in around 1850. In 1854, after he left the area, it was discovered that he had tried to prise out the inscription from the rock by (according to the local villagers) throwing ‘a quantity of hot tamarind juice and water’ on it and then beating the rock with hammers, causing a large part of the inscribed portion to break off. Elliot wasn’t really identified and the question of the Jaugada vandal was eventually dropped but all fingers point to him as the prime suspect.

Undeterred by these bumps and glitches, though, Prinsep slaved away at his self-appointed task, studying the clues with dogged determination and loath to give up on this seemingly intractable mystery. For four years, he puzzled over the ‘pin men’ script in Calcutta’s humid haze while most of his ilk disappeared into the hills for a respite from the heat. In 1837, a set of epigraphic tracings arrived from Sanchi in Madhya Pradesh, taken from the railings and gateways of a stupa and a fragmented pillar beside it. The pillar, apparently, had been uprooted and broken by a local zamindar to use as a sugarcane press.

Now before you raise your eyebrows at this, you should remember that most historical artefacts (at least, before they are dubbed as such) are treated with casual disdain by people all around the world—an aspect that enormously complicates the work of historians. Ancient pottery fragments are flung around in the interests of construction and will, quite often, pave the roads that you travel on. Epigraphs will often be buttressed by ardent etchings by modern-day couples, professing their love for each other or their valuable opinions about existence, such that the original material is obscured or damaged. People will lean lovingly on pillars to get their profiles shot and uploaded on social media, leaving their grubby prints all over the surface. And, of course, we should not forget that universal scourge of museums—the peculiar breed of people who, despite the express prohibition, will sneak in ‘flash’ shots of relics, undismayed by the likelihood of damaging valuable pieces of historical evidence, in the process. A stoic and stubborn species, this!

Let us return from our ranting to the tale of Prinsep, who, while viewing the Sanchi tracings, immediately realised that these inscriptions were shorter than most, ending with what appeared to be the same word of three letters—although these still remained largely impenetrable squiggles. Wracking his brain, he recollected the many donative inscriptions in Sanskrit that he had seen on temple walls and pillars in different places that recorded donations made by varied categories of devotees. The one word that always characterised these epigraphs was danam or ‘the gift of’.

Working on the presumption that this was the last word in the Sanchi tracings, he identified three letters—D, N and M (or their equivalent). Eventually, the ‘pin men’ script resolved itself into what Prinsep called Ashokan Brahmi, written in Pali, an ancient language that existed alongside Sanskrit and used by the common people. Enlisting the help of scholars who could read the sacred Tibetan Buddhist texts, which used Pali, a light appeared at the end of this linguistic tunnel—these were inscriptions that recorded donations made to a Buddhist monastery in Sanchi by people who had lived two thousand years ago.

Prinsep promptly tackled the longer inscriptions and discovered to his joy that they all began with the same phrase Devanampiye piyadassi raja hevam aha (when transcribed into Sanskrit, Devanampriya priyadarshi raja…) or ‘The beloved of the gods, Piyadassi raja declares…’ Here was a huge Eureka moment—a king named Piyadassi was making a declaration to his subjects. The tone was benevolent, sometimes remorseful, usually caring. But there remained the mystery of his identity, helped very little by the speaker’s offhand remark, off and on, that he was raja magadhe, indicating that he ruled Magadha but finding no parallel in any extant list of kings.

The tale is a long and complicated one, paved with tremendous hard work and fortunate discoveries that helped in putting the mammoth jigsaw together. After collating all the information that was coming in not just as regards the inscribed surfaces but also other pertinent finds, and with key evidence provided by the Sri Lankan Pali chronicles, everything suddenly fell into place for Prinsep. His decipherment of the Brahmi script in question, his translations of the Sanchi and other donations and his identification of the Beloved of the Gods, Devanampiya Piyadasi, as Ashoka Maurya awed the historical world in general and his fellow Orientalists, in particular. Prinsep, on the basis of his translations, was even able to provide a rough chronology of events in Ashoka’s rule that spanned the Kalinga war and his creation of the machinery of dhamma.

In Charles Allen’s excellent narrative history of the ‘discovery’ of Ashoka in the nineteenth century, the atmosphere connected with it appears to be electric—and understandably so, charged, as it was, with the epigraphic evidence—facsimiles of the writings on rocks and pillars all over the country—that archaeologists, history-enthusiasts and others were sending in to the Asiatic Society of Bengal. There are all sorts of fascinating tales that form a part of the larger Ashoka quest, both of Prinsep’s vintage and much later, such as Anton Führer being authorised in 1895 to cross the border into Nepal on an elephant to examine an inscribed pillar known locally as Bimasena ki Nigali (Bhim Sen’s smoking pipe). It was discovered to be Ashoka’s Nigali Sagar Pillar Edict, which, along with the one at Lumbini/Rummindei, were results of his royal tour in around 250 BCE.

Nevertheless, with Prinsep’s brilliant decipherment, Ashoka suddenly burst out of the darkness into the light, as it were; thence commenced a fascination with this figure amongst historical circles that has not ceased till today. Painstakingly compiled compendiums began to emerge. Mention must be made, in this regard, of Alexander Cunningham’s Inscriptions of Asoka (and here we must hasten to add that in historian-speak, which involves the addition of diacritical marks to aid pronunciation, this is the correct way to spell his name, along with the diacritical mark on the ‘s’—not Asoca, for instance, a recently-used version of it that, unfortunately, would end up being pronounced as Asocha, which is an unwarranted mangling of the original name!).

Incidentally, Cunningham, himself the first director general of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), compiled the available epigraphs into the first volume of the Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum, a Bible of sorts for anyone venturing into that period of history. The series itself is mandatory reading for any historian: it makes available all the epigraphic evidence of ancient India through different dedicated volumes. The one on Ashoka, though, had the added benefit of Cunningham’s personal exploration of the Ashokan sites that preceded his compilation. Ashoka’s epigraphs in the south were discovered later, though—they are not part of this volume.

Lest all this conveys the impression that we were, basically, waiting for the British to come and discover Ashoka, we must add that the onus did not lie on them. Nor did we know nothing about him until enlightenment dawned on us courtesy the history enthusiasts of the colonial era. As mentioned earlier, Ashoka was not just the focus of several chronicles, featuring in textual tradition down the ages, but also appeared in local legends from time to time, and was known to a select group of Indian scholars and Buddhist communities across Asia.

In fact, as Charles Allen argues, the disappearance of ‘Ashoka’s Song’, his resounding voice and persona, might have been intrinsically linked to his promotion of Buddhism and his consequent removal from historical records compiled over generations by those who felt threatened by it.6 So Ashoka was not exactly a gift of the Englishmen to us; rather, they managed to nudge him out from relative obscurity into the public glare, there to remain while his extraordinary deeds captured the imagination of generation after generation and his epigraphs continue to be discovered to the present day, turning up fresh information to be considered and analysed.

And, of course, not all those connected with his resurrection were Europeans. The Indian archaeologist, Bhagwanlal Indraji, for instance, discovered Ashokan edicts in Maharashtra and Rajasthan in the late nineteenth century but for several insidious reasons intimately connected with language and power, did not get his due. Ashokan epigraphs have been emerging with surprising and delightful frequency ever since—and in all manner of material contexts. A perusal of the exhaustive list provided by Nayanjot Lahiri, for instance, in her seminal work on Ashoka, Ashoka in Ancient India, attests to this.

Thus, Ashoka’s Maski inscription in Karnataka was chanced upon by a gold prospector in 1915 and his Gavimath edict (Karnataka, again) by the guru of a math in Gavimath in 1931. The most recent discovery, according to this list, was of the Ratanpurwa edict in Bihar in 2009. One suspects that further churning of the earth and digging-up of surfaces will throw up more significant finds for us to mull over and interpret. And therein, too, lies the secret behind Ashoka’s popularity. Who can deny the attraction of this powerful historical figure whose story is still being put together in the manner of a very large jigsaw puzzle? One never knows what the next epigraph will reveal in this manifestly incomplete but fascinating tale!

Back to our original story and the point where Ashoka finally triumphed over rival contenders to the Mauryan throne. Having tasted blood, so to speak, Ashoka inaugurated his reign with displays of ill-temper and petulance, and a scale of violence that, if true, beggared belief. To begin with—and with chilling ingratitude—he apparently insisted that all the ministers who had supported him during the succession struggle undergo a loyalty test and then promptly killed five hundred of them because he found them wanting, in this respect. The details thereof are fairly convoluted but this is another classic cautionary tale of what happens when power goes to one’s head.

Here is what transpired: it appears, or so the story goes, that the once-loyal team of ministers who had been instrumental in Ashoka’s accession to the throne soon began to treat him with scorn and this was something that the arrogant king would not brook. Summoning the offending group, he issued a royal dictate—in order to prove their loyalty to him, they were to cut down every single tree that bore flowers and fruit while sparing those that were thorny. Now this was an entirely ridiculous proposition—thorny trees also bear flowers and fruit—but the whole idea was to blindly execute the order rather than to question its intrinsic logic.

However, the hapless ministers either could not understand how to go about the task or were confounded by its ludicrousness and so, despite Ashoka repeating his order thrice, they failed to carry it out. Accordingly, the young king personally chopped off their heads (which must have been an exhausting enterprise given their huge number). Incidentally, while you may well rail against Ashoka’s cruelty, it is pertinent to note that the Arthashastra recommended regular tests for kings to appraise the loyalty—or lack of it—in their ministers, so there was nothing very unusual about this story, in that sense. It was just a part of prescribed state policy.

If this were not enough, though, Ashoka then turned his ire on some women of his harem who had insulted him. The story is an equally captivating and bloodthirsty one, and begins one day during the spring when Ashoka was strolling with his harem in a park in Pataliputra. In a mellow mood and stopping regularly to smell the roses, as it were, the king caught sight of a beautiful Ashoka tree in full bloom and tarried awhile to appreciate his botanical namesake. The more he gazed, the more his mercurial mind steadied, which caused him to become, all of a sudden, ‘very affectionate’ towards his women—a delicate turn of phrase for a roll in the hay, so to speak.

Unfortunately, though, the women of his harem did not enjoy caressing his rough-skinned body and were annoyed when forced to do so. Scouting about for ways to vent their frustration, they caught sight of the Ashoka tree that their king had so admired and, just like that, a brilliant plan of revenge slid into their minds. Accordingly, while the king slumbered, they chopped off all its flowers and branches, reducing it to little more than a denuded twig. When Ashoka got to know of this, the inevitable happened—he burned five hundred of the women alive as counter-revenge for maiming his precious Ashoka tree. (It is very tempting to think of the tree bemoaning its fate in the manner of Antonio in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, thus: ‘I am the unhappy subject of these quarrels’, but that is neither here nor there!)

The Ashokavadana tells us that Ashoka’s prime minister, horrified at his sovereign’s killings, prevailed upon him to appoint a royal executioner who could execute the king’s bloodlust in his stead. After much research, a weaver boy named Girika the Fierce/Chandagirika from a Magadhan village was found to be the ideal candidate with the requisite amounts of ferocity that the job required and who obligingly offered to ‘execute the whole of Jambudvipa’ when questioned about his abilities by the king’s men. It seems that on his request, Ashoka built a jail in Pataliputra, which was, in fact, an elaborate torture chamber where he amused himself by watching his various victims in the throes of great physical agony, while Chandagirika ran riot within its confines and with the king’s blessing.

All in all, a thoroughly bloodthirsty, unpleasant character (both of them, in fact, but here we are referring specifically to Ashoka) with the means and the will to run amok, and unleash general havoc on his hapless attendants and subjects! Kautilya, had he been around, would have thrown a fit—and then some more!—at this callous disregard of the rules of royal etiquette by his beloved protégé’s grandson. ‘Watch your back’, he would have warned with tight-lipped disapproval. ‘This is exactly the sort of behaviour that creates enemies and beckons disaster.’ But there was no one to rein Ashoka in or pour soothing and sensible counsel into his ears. He was, basically, a law unto himself. Incidentally, this torture chamber was tentatively identified by L.A. Waddell in the late 1800s in an ancient well (known locally as the agam kuan or bottomless well) outside Patna, whose long association with evil apparently ensured that nobody drank from it.

The empire that Ashoka inherited in c. 268 BCE was a massive one. Fast-forwarding a little, the distribution of his inscriptions is a good indicator of its extent at the end of his own reign in 232 BCE. It included almost the entire subcontinent; in the northwest, it extended up to Kandahar in Afghanistan; and its eastern frontier extended to Kalinga (Odisha). The only parts outside the Mauryan pale were the southernmost extremities, which were inhabited by the Cholas and Pandyas, according to Rock Edict 13 (however, Rock Edict 2 claims that these areas were occupied by the Keralaputras and Satiyaputras). Before we get on with the actual details of Ashoka’s story, it would be pertinent to note here that despite his later pacifism, Ashoka had complete control over his vast empire, which, unfortunately, went to pieces in the hands of his successors—an oblique indicator of the power and strength that he otherwise wielded at the helm.

There are several ways to approach Ashoka’s story, which is a complex and multifaceted one—as befits a complex and multifaceted man. This was, after all, the only ruler in the ancient world to devise a way to speak directly to his people in every corner of his huge empire, making use of material that already existed in the form of rocks or creating further endurable ones, his pillars, on which to inscribe his thoughts and feelings and dictates. Clearly, this was a man of pure genius! He also ended, as Nayanjot Lahiri observes, ‘a long phase of faceless rulers’ though his inscriptions. So even though, she notes, it is tough to write about Ashoka’s life in a way that is consistent with modern biographical criteria, there are various ways to approach his story. And it is quite impossible to tell his tale without going back and forth in time and repeating oneself, and reiterating old and new connections.

So does one start with the Buddhism angle or the aftermath of Kalinga or his inscriptions in their entirety or go backwards in time from his memorialisation in the present? It seems that we will have to mesh them all together to make any sense of it all! It would also be fair to remind the reader that if one intends to understand Ashoka, one needs to deal with the entire set of his major and minor rock edicts, and pillar edicts, as well as pertinent inscriptions, such as commemorative, donative and fragmentary ones, as well as a set of cave inscriptions belonging to his time in the Barabar hill caves in Bihar. As his messages were inscribed over several years, it is possible to trace his evolving personality and priorities through them.

And of course, the mainstay of his story, the conflict he engineered at Kalinga in c. 261 BCE, where, ironically, he managed to horrify himself with the violence and devastation he had unleashed—and adopted (in his typical, whimsical way) a different path altogether. But we are anticipating ourselves a bit. Let us go back a little in the story to ask if Ashoka was really as bloodthirsty and terrible as he was made out to be. Was he, in fact, a normal, more-or-less sane person who was initially vilified? Or does the truth lie somewhere in between? Endless fascinating theories can ensue from this. For instance, did Bindusara sense the violence in his son, which is why he did not want him as the next Mauryan ruler? Or did Buddhist texts deliberately portray Ashoka in a dark light, as a violent degenerate, so as to later prove the colossal scale of his change? Looking back over such a massive span of time, it is difficult to pinpoint the truth but we can put together some hints and clues, and try to reconstruct it.

The Ashokavadana builds Ashoka’s background with much care. Thus, in one of his previous births when he was a young boy named Jaya, the Buddha came upon him playing by the roadside. The little boy put a handful of dirt into the latter’s begging bowl of his own accord and wished, as he did so, that he should become a king and a follower of the Buddha. The Buddha, touched and impressed by the boy’s gift, smiled and this lit up the universe with rays of light. These rays re-entered the Buddha’s left palm, signifying that the child before him would become a great emperor in his next life.

Accordingly, the Buddha told his disciple, Ananda, that this boy who had thrown a handful of dirt into his bowl would, in the course of time, become a great and righteous king who would rule his empire from his capital at Pataliputra. (The gift of dirt is seen as an explanation for his rough skin in this birth.) And so, Ashoka had a brush with divinity and was merely fulfilling his blessing by eventually becoming an exemplary Buddhist king. That his fame travelled well beyond the Indian subcontinent and endures till today is a matter of mortal contrivance, though.

So how and when did Ashoka fulfil this prophecy in its entirety by embracing Buddhism? Most popular accounts of his reign present him as distraught and broken after the battle of Kalinga, despite his being the victor, unable to digest the fact of his having caused so much bloodshed and destruction. This inner transformation leads him to eschew his previous digvijaya or conquest by war and adopt dhamma-vijaya/dharma-vijaya or conquest through dharma, thereafter. Buddhism apparently appears as a better, more viable alternative for him, at this point, and he devotes his entire life to following and spreading its tenets, the latter through his edicts and inscriptions addressed to the general public.

Yet right at the outset, we have several warring versions. Buddhist texts invariably present Ashoka as an evil character whose conversion to Buddhism was a sudden, transformative event. Interestingly, they make no mention of the Kalinga war itself. The Mahavamsa and Dipavamsa claim that Ashoka turned to Buddhism when his nephew, Nigrodha, who had become a monk at the age of seven, preached the doctrine to him. On the other hand, the Divyavadana points to the influence of Samudra, a merchant-turned-monk who had been subjected to the agonies of Ashoka’s torture chamber but had remained unaffected. Incidentally, the Chinese pilgrim, Xuanzang, who visited India in the seventh century CE and whose account has been used as corroborative material for many key points of Indian history, supports this particular tale. The Ashokavadana, on the other hand, mixes both and speaks of Samudra, the twelve-year-old son of a merchant, as the person responsible for bringing Ashoka under the influence of the Buddhist dhamma.

Strangely enough, though, Ashoka’s own inscriptions do not mention any of these incidents. You would think that if someone had played such an important role in a royal spiritual transformation of this scale, he would at least find mention in some official record or the other! But the whole affair remains somewhat shrouded in mystery. Yet Ashoka speaks very clearly through his inscriptions and so one should give credence to his voice. Ashoka’s Major Rock Edict 13 speaks of the Kalinga war, which occurred in the ninth year of his reign, and implies that it had a pivotal role to play in his adoption of a policy of pacifism. Minor Rock Edict 1 also notes that Ashoka turned gradually, not suddenly, towards the Buddha’s teachings.

More evidence of Ashoka’s belief in Buddhism are provided by the Rummindei (Lumbini) and Nigali Sagar inscriptions. According to the former, Ashoka visited Lumbini, the birthplace of the Buddha, in the twenty-first year of his reign and worshipped there. He had a stone wall built around the place, installed this particular pillar to commemorate his visit and announced some tax concessions for the villagers. The latter notes that fourteen years after his consecration, Ashoka enlarged the stupa containing the relics of Buddha Konagamana (a mythical Buddha, Kanakamuni) to double its size. Six years later, he visited this place and had the stone pillar in question erected.

And so, if you collate all this epigraphic evidence, you realise that Ashoka is not just confessing his personal faith in Buddhism but also making his deeds suit the words. However, there are more frustrating contradictions in store. The Pali chronicles claim that Ashoka convened a grand Buddhist council at Pataliputra, presided over by Moggaliputta Tissa, to cleanse the sangha of certain unacceptable practices. And yet, the Ashokan inscriptions make no mention of this event, thereby provoking a flurry of explanations from scholars. Some claim that the Pali chronicles were inaccurate while others believe that a minor meeting of this kind might have occurred with which Ashoka had no connection. A third explanation is that there were, in fact, two councils, which the Buddhist tradition mistakenly merged into one.

Much is made of Ashoka’s ‘schism edict’, in this regard, wherein he warns members of the Buddhist sangha against causing any division or dissension in its ranks (‘It is my wish that the Sangha community may always be united.’). But it has also been argued that Ashoka only intervened in the affairs of the order to expel some of its disobedient members and not to counter some kind of doctrinal schism. Incidentally, three Schism Edict pillars have been found so far—at Sanchi, Sarnath and Kausambi—but there must have been many more. Further evidence of Ashoka’s Buddhist inclinations is provided by the remarkable twelfth-century text, Rajatarangini by Kalhana, according to which he (or someone with his very name but that is too much of a coincidence!) introduced Buddhism in Kashmir. If, as was surmised, this Ashoka was the same as the third Mauryan ruler of the Puranic dynastic tables, then he was clearly powerful enough to impose his preferred religion on the largely Shaivite populace of early Kashmir.

In any case, that Ashoka had an abiding connection with the Buddhist sangha and its leading monks is a given, as also his unbounded generosity towards it, as seen through several legends. If one goes by the numbers provided by the Buddhist tradition—a mindboggling eighty-four thousand stupas and viharas were apparently built by him!—one might be forgiven for assuming that he spent a large chunk of his time in designing and sanctioning construction activities. But, remember, this was a sovereign who barely slept, going by his willingness to meet his officials at all times and, of course, Kautilya’s royal spartan sleep regimen hanging over it all. Ashoka is also supposed to have gone on pilgrimage to all the major places connected with the Buddha and to have created signs there to guide future pilgrims. So he was clearly a fervent follower of the Buddha’s teaching and to have been recognised as such by the sangha in general even if he did not ever become its formal member.

The question of who Ashoka’s spiritual mentor was remains unresolved, though. The Mahavamsa claims it was Moggaliputta Tissa; the Ashokavadana, Upagupta; while others point to Yashah, the head of the Kukkutarama monastery outside Pataliputra, which plays an important part in his later life. Ashoka explicates his relationship with the sangha through his epigraphs. He seems to have drawn closer to it by degrees until a point when he throws himself heart and soul into its work so much so that Minor Rock Edict 3 at Bairat has him greeting the sangha, proclaiming his faith in it, and listing six Buddhist texts that he desires monks, nuns and laypersons to listen to and reflect upon. What the Buddhists of the time thought of his recommendations is a matter for conjecture. What is not, though, is that he had read and pondered over these stipulated texts; he would not be recommending them, otherwise!

What we also have incontrovertible evidence for, though, is the Mahavamsa’s assertion that Ashoka sent off a number of Buddhist missions at the end of the third Buddhist council—to the Himalayas, the northwest, Kashmir and Gandhara, central India, western Malwa, the western Deccan, Myanmar or southeast Asia, and Sri Lanka. A very precise and thorough encompassing of his known world, this! Of the five monks despatched to the Himalayan region, two find mention on the relic casket found in Stupa no. 2 at the Buddhist monastic site of Sanchi in central India. And, of course, that the one sent to Sri Lanka was Ashoka’s own son, Mahinda/Mahindra/Mahendra, is a well-known fact. Add to this the fact that Ashoka was the prime propagator of his own message of dhamma at home—and you have a clearly indefatigable, if dhamma-obsessed, person on your hands.

Self-righteously replacing his pleasure tours (vihara-yatas) with dhamma tours (dhamma-yatas), he declares that the latter has made him happier than anything else. And he obviously enjoyed meeting people: these tours involved conversing with and interrogating the latter about dhamma, as also bestowing gifts on them—rather in the nature of an ancient quiz show with prizes except that this one was conducted at random places all over the realm and with anyone who showed up (and they must have shown up in droves!). More notably, these dhamma-yatas were also a great way for him to gauge public opinion and check up on local officials. Also, with such a huge empire, it was necessary for him to visit rural areas (in fact, he was probably the first Indian ruler on record to appreciate the importance of the rural population) and outlying regions to let the people know he was around and generally keeping an eye on things.

Also, Ashoka, the politically sagacious, rather adroitly kept the definition of dhamma fluid to suit his purposes. It was, basically, non-violence towards all living beings, truthfulness, compassion, respect towards one’s parents and so on but, as B.N. Mukherjee points out, the Greek and Aramaic inscriptions (alluded to elsewhere) display some intriguing variations. The Greek inscription in Kandahar, for instance, talks of the subjects’ devotion to the king’s interest as being an important part of dhamma—a significant addition. And neither do the Greek or Aramaic inscriptions talk of the attainment of heaven as a goal/result of following dhamma, which the Prakrit inscriptions mention ad nauseum. What they do reveal, though, along with some of his later edicts, is that dhamma was increasingly becoming the single thought in his mind to the exclusion of all else.

Ashoka was, in addition, somewhat delusional (or extremely hopeful, depending on which way you view it) on the manner in which he had changed the lives of his subjects through its propagation. Take the case of the bilingual Shar-i-Kuna inscription, for instance. Incidentally, he is King Piodosses in the Greek portion and ‘our lord Prydrs the king’ in the Aramaic—examples of the often-delightfully whimsical ways in which names are cheerfully borrowed from a source and mangled, thereafter, so that historians are routinely confounded when they encounter them. The Greek part notes that from the moment the king made his ‘doctrine of piety’ (eusebeia) known, ‘everything thrives throughout the whole world’.

Everyone took their cue from him: all hunting and fishing ceased, while the ‘intemperate’ became temperate and respectful—and there was every reason to believe they would continue to behave thus in the future and, therefore, ‘live better and more happily’. The Aramaic part, which substitutes ‘truth’ (qyst) for the Greek piety, makes more grandiose claims: ever since the king’s campaign, ‘evil has diminished for all men’, ‘all hostile things’ have disappeared and ‘joy has arisen throughout the whole earth’. This, as you can imagine, must have bewildered the denizens of the area who might or might not have witnessed this radical transformation in their lives despite the edict’s insistence on it.

And as you can further imagine, the question of what Ashoka’s dhamma was really all about has bewildered most historians over the years. Some say it was a sort of universal religion (and we can draw parallels with the Mughal emperor, Akbar’s invention of Sulh-i-kul, in this regard). Others say it was a form of raja-dharma (a king’s dharma), melding the political and moral principles of the Buddhist and Brahmanical traditions. To complicate matters, it has also been seen as a simplified version of the Buddha’s teaching for the laity (upasaka dharma) or even (and this might cause total bewilderment!) an amalgam of all these things. Romila Thapar, for instance, says that dhamma was a political or ideological tool used by Ashoka to draw his huge empire closer together. It was a practical concept that, in her view, failed to unite the people. She also cautions against viewing him as a ‘monster of piety’, which is what the Buddhist sources would have us believe, a picture that is not really endorsed by his epigraphs, too.

The Buddhist core of Ashoka’s dhamma, though, is undeniable: the constant and forceful reiteration of ahimsa (the Arthashastra also mentions it but more as a glancing reference), and the resonances of Buddhist teachings and ideas in the edicts are a case in point. Add to this the fact that Ashoka started his dhamma-yatas after a visit to Bodhgaya, the intensely Buddhist sculptural motifs attached to his pillars (a specific and telling instance, among others, being the elephant, symbolising the future Buddha, appearing on rocks bearing the dhamma edicts) and Buddhist remains being found near many Ashokan pillars—and you have a distinct link between Ashoka, his dhamma and Buddhism.

Having said that, one should note that Ashoka, while inventing his own special creed, may have been heavily inspired by the Buddhist dhamma but went way beyond it in terms of its content and the manner in which he used it. Upinder Singh, for instance, points to his insistence on mutual respect between people of different beliefs and the fact that the dhamma-mahamatas were to concern themselves with all sects, as well as his phrasing and usage of dhamma-vijaya or conquest through dhamma as clues to his being a true ‘innovator’ who used his personal feelings and professional compulsions to come up with his masterful strategy of religious/ethical governance.

And now, we may turn to Kalinga, the event that started it all and the watershed in Ashoka’s life.