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The Legend of King Asoka
A Study and Translation of the Asokavadana
By John S. Strong PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1983 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06575-5
CHAPTER 1
The Legend and Its Background
When King Asoka acceded to the Mauryan throne circa 270 B.C., he inherited an empire that extended from Bengal in the East to Afghanistan in the Northwest. His grandfather Candragupta had founded the dynasty, conquering the whole of the Gangetic plain and successfully pushing back the satraps of Alexander the Great. His father Bindusara had campaigned in the Deccan Plateau, expanding the empire's frontiers as far south as Mysore. It was Asoka, however, who brought the Mauryan dynasty to its apogee. After conquering the land of the Kalingas in the Southeast, he settled down to almost forty years of rule, in peace and relative prosperity. Under him, for the first time in history, virtually the entire Indian subcontinent was politically unified, with only the southernmost tip of the peninsula remaining outside his domain.
Asoka is best known today for his royal edicts and rock inscriptions engraved on cliff faces and stone pillars all over his empire. In these he set forth his policies of enlightened rule. In what is, perhaps, the most famous of his edicts, he speaks in touchingly personal terms of his own remorse at the tremendous amount of suffering and loss of life caused by his war against the Kalingas. Henceforth, he states, he will give up violent means of conquest and devote himself entirely to the study, love, and propagation of Dharma.
Precisely what Asoka meant by Dharma has been the subject of much debate. In Buddhist circles, the word means the Buddha's Teachings — his doctrine — and it is thus widely supposed that this event marked Asoka's conversion to the Buddhist faith. More generally, however, Dharma can be translated as law, duty, or righteousness, and as such it has many overtones in Indian religion. However he intended it, in his edicts, Asoka seems to have been obsessed with Dharma. The Asokan state was to be governed according to Dharma. The people were to follow Dharma. Wars of aggression were to be replaced by peaceful conquests of Dharma. Special royal ministers were charged with the propagation of Dharma. True delight in this world came only with delight in Dharma, and the old royal pleasure-tours and hunts were replaced by Dharma-pilgrimages.
From these and other indications, we may say that Dharma seems to have meant for Asoka a moral polity of active social concern, religious tolerance, ecological awareness, the observance of common ethical precepts, and the renunciation of war. In Pillar Edict VII, for example, he orders banyan trees and mango groves to be planted, resthouses to be built, and wells to be dug every half-mile along the roads. In Rock Edict I, he establishes an end to the killing and consumption of most animals in the royal kitchens. In Rock Edict II, he orders the provision of medical facilities for men and beasts. In Rock Edict III, he enjoins obedience to mother and father, generosity toward priests and ascetics, and frugality in spending. In Rock Edict V, he commissions officers to work for the welfare and happiness of the poor and aged. In Rock Edict VI, he declares his intention constantly to promote the welfare of all beings so as to pay off his debt to living creatures and to work for their happiness in this world and the next. And in Rock Edict XII, he honors men of all faiths.
Because of these and other enlightened policies, students of world history have often spoken admiringly of Asoka as a ruler. H. G. Wells, for example, finding in the edicts a seemingly modern monarch who appeared to share his own sociopolitical sympathies, declared: "Amidst the tens of thousands of names of monarchs that crowd the columns of history, their majesties and graciousnesses, and serenities and royal highnesses and the like, the name of Asoka shines, and shines almost alone, a star. From the Volga to Japan, his name is still honoured. China, Tibet, and even India, though it has left his doctrine, preserve the tradition of his greatness. More living men cherish his memory today than ever have heard the names of Constantine or Charlemagne."
There is nothing wrong with such paeans of praise as long as it is clear that they reflect only a personal enthusiasm for the image of Asoka presented in the edicts. When, however, it is implied that Buddhists the world over — "from the Volga to Japan" — must have admired Asoka for the same reasons, then an objection must be sounded. Historically speaking, Buddhists the world over have known virtually nothing about the Asoka-of-the-edicts. Instead, their enthusiasm for Asoka was based almost entirely on the Buddhist legends that grew up around him, and that form the subject of this book.
The Legends and the Edicts
There is a very simple explanation for the predominance of the legends. Although the edicts were inscribed in the third century B.C., the Brahmi script in which they were written was soon forgotten, and it was only with its decipherment by James Prinsep in 1837 that the Asoka-of-the-edicts came to the fore once again.
It is not certain how soon the Brahmi script was forgotten. In the memoirs of his journey to India (629-45), the Chinese pilgrim Hsüan-tsang several times claims to be able to read the inscriptions or, at least, to know what they say. For example, when he visits the site of the Buddha's final nirvana in Kusinagari, he reports that the inscription on the Asoka pillar there recounted the circumstances of the Blessed One's death and adds that, unfortunately, it did not give the day and month of that event. On another occasion, he complains of the deteriorated condition of the script, but claims to be able to make out its meaning anyhow.
Clearly, Hsüan-tsang wants to leave us with the impression that he, or at least someone he met, could actually read the text of the edicts. Unfortunately, the contents he attributes to these inscriptions simply do not correspond to the actual text of known Asokan edicts. Indeed, in some instances where archaeologists have found the very pillars that Hsüan-tsang must have seen, and read the words he purports to have understood, there is no correspondence between them. Despite his claims, then, it is clear that by his time, and most probably by the time of his predecessor Fa-hsien (whose voyage to India was from 399-414), the Indian script had long been forgotten and the message of the edicts lost.
It is sometimes assumed that, unable to read the inscriptions himself, Hsüan-tsang accepted the word of local monks or guides as to their contents, and that these, unable to read them either, quickly created some interpretation in order to gratify the pilgrim. There may be some truth in this. As we shall see, centuries later, when the Sultan Firuz Shah of Delhi called upon certain Hindu pandits to interpret the inscriptions on an Asoka pillar, they delivered on the spot a totally fanciful reading in order to please their patron.
But this could hardly be the total explanation for Hsüan-tsang's misreadings of the inscriptions. What are we to make, for example, of the fact that, in one instance at least, he gives us exactly the same reading for a pillar inscription near Pataliputra as his predecessor Fa-hsien did two and a half centuries earlier? It may be, of course, that Hsüan-tsang (who was familiar with Fa-hsien's account of his journey) simply plagiarized his predecessor when he came to the same place, but this would hardly be characteristic of him. It is more likely that they were both told the same thing centuries apart.
Obviously, local guides at pilgrimage sites must have preserved and passed on their own traditions about the meaning of these cryptic inscriptions, however false their interpretations may in fact have been. There is no reason to suspect them of inventing a reading for an inscription out of embarrassment at their inability to read it; they were merely transmitting the oral tradition about what the inscriptions said.
Interestingly, this oral tradition did manage to preserve the knowledge of the connection between the edicts and the person of Asoka. Even though they could not read the Brahmi inscriptions, nor even get anyone correctly to read them for them, the Chinese pilgrims were told that their author was Asoka, a king about whom they already knew, of course, from the Buddhist legends. It comes as no surprise, then, that Hsüan-tsang's and Fa-hsien's misinterpretations of the Asokan inscriptions reflect their knowledge of the Asokan legends much more than the actual text of the edicts. This is important, for it has long been customary, in scholarly circles, to read and interpret the legends of Asoka in the light of the edicts. In the history of Buddhism, however, just the opposite happened; the pillars and inscriptions were explained in view of the legends. For example, both pilgrims, familiar with the Chinese versions of the Asokan story, conceived of the king primarily as a supporter of the Buddhist sangha(monastic community) and as a great builder of the stupas that marked the sites of their pilgrimage route. For them, the pillars were not edicts at all; they did not seek to proclaim a new royal Dharma but simply commemorated an event in the life of the Buddha or in the history of Buddhism and recorded what had happened at that spot. They were ancient signposts piously erected by Asoka for the benefit of travellers and pilgrims. Thus, as we have seen, according to Hsüan-tsang, the Asoka pillar at Kusinagari merely recounted the circumstances of the Buddha's death. Another pillar not far from there recorded the division of the Buddha's relics among the eight kings. A pillar at Atavi told how the Buddha had subdued certain demons there. An inscription at the stupa of the former Buddha Krakucchanda related the circumstance of his death. In the eyes of the pilgrims, then, Asoka, much like the modern-day Indian Department of Archaeology, was responsible for marking the important Buddhist sites with signposts.
Now in the Asokan legends, in both the Sanskrit and Chinese versions, this is precisely one of the things that Asoka is presented as doing. In fact, prior to his pilgrimage tour with the elder Upagupta, he states his intention to visit all the important sites and to "mark them with signs as a favor to posterity." There is some debate among scholars as to just what these signs were supposed to have been, but it may well be that the Chinese pilgrims and/or their local guides, familiar with the legends but ignorant of the edicts, assumed that the pillars were just markers intended to commemorate local events.
Another instance of the way that the legends of Asoka affected the interpretation of the edicts may be found in the pilgrims' account of a pillar edict at a site near Pataliputra. Not too far from the city, Hsiian-tsang declares, "there was a stone pillar above thirty feet high, with an inscription much injured. The sum of the contents of the inscription was that Asoka, strong in faith, had thrice given Jambudvipa as a religious offering to the Buddhist order, and thrice redeemed it."
Unfortunately, archaeologists have not found this inscribed pillar, so we have no way of definitely checking Hsüan-tsang's statement. But, as Vincent Smith has pointed out, such an inscription would hardly be in line with the content and character of the known edicts. Hsüan-tsang's misreading of the inscription, however, makes perfect sense to one familiar with the legends of Asoka. For in the legends, Asoka is indeed portrayed, several times, as offering the whole world and his own sovereignty to the Buddhist sangha, and on one of these occasions, at the end of his life, he is even said to have made a written inscription recording his gift and testifying to his generosity and devotion. Once again, the Chinese pilgrims may well have been misinterpreting the Asokan edicts, but they were misinterpreting them in light of what they knew about Asoka from the legends.
After the demise of Buddhism in India, however, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, even the association of the pillars with the name of Asoka was forgotten. Shams-i Siraj 'Afif, the fourteenth-century chronicler of the reign of the Sultan Firuz Shah of Delhi (1351-88) provides some interesting details about the further fortunes of two of the Asokan pillars. According to him, Firuz Shah was "filled with admiration" for two stone columns at Topra and Mirat, and, wishing to have them as trophies and monuments to his glory, he had them transported to Delhi where they still stand today. The account goes on to give details of their transport; they were packed in reeds and animal skins, lifted on to a forty-two-wheel carriage, hauled to the river and then taken by barge to the capital. The writing on the base of the pillars was examined with care. Many Brahmin scholars were asked to decipher it, but none was able. Some, however, declared the inscriptions stated that "no one [w]ould be able to remove the obelisk from its place till there should arise in the latter days a Muhammadan king named Sultan Firoz."
While the pandits puzzled over these Asokan edicts, however, popular opinion had already made up its mind about the pillars themselves. Again according to Shams-i Siraj, the local tradition was that "these columns of stone had been the walking sticks of the accursed Bhím [Bhima, one of the Pandava brothers in the Mahabharata], a man of great stature and size." He goes on to specify that, in those days, beasts were much larger than they are now and that Bhim used these stone pillars as goads while tending his cattle. He and his brothers lived near Delhi, and when he died, these columns were left as memorials to him.
It would be interesting to follow the further fortunes of the Asokan pillars under Moghul and even British rule. One of the rock edicts, for example, was to become closely associated with a shrine of Siva, and was the haunt of wild animals. But it is clear that already in the fourteenth century, the inscriptions could not only not be read, but that, in the minds of pandits and populace alike, the pillars themselves had lost all connection with the name of Asoka.
It is understandable, then, that when James Prinsep deciphered the Brahmi script in 1837 and correctly read the edicts, he did not know whose they were. Misled by Asoka's use in his inscriptions of the name "Beloved of the Gods" (Devanampriya), he claimed the pillars had been erected by King Devanampiya Tissa of Sri Lanka. Shortly thereafter, George Tumour corrected him and rightly attributed the edicts to Asoka. Interestingly enough, he did this on the basis of his knowledge of the Pali legends that also call Asoka "Devanampiya." Once again, the legends were influencing the reading of the edicts.
With the identity of the author of the edicts established, however, a new era in the evaluation of the figure of Asoka began. Basically, two concerns now came to dominate Asokan scholarship, both determined by the content and character not of the legends but of the epigraphy. First, because the inscriptions contain numerous references to various dates in the reign of Asoka, there was a great temptation to reconstruct the history, or even more precisely the chronology, of Asoka's life and rule. In this quest for the historical Asoka, the edicts were accepted as the historical standard against which all other materials were to be measured, and a whole spectrum of attitudes toward the historicity of the legendary traditions emerged. Some scholars were now inclined to dismiss the legends as "downright and absurd mythological accounts." Others held that one could glean from them, especially from the Sinhalese chronicles, some valuable historical materials about Asoka, although these must "be discredited when found lacking in corroboration from the inscriptions." More liberally, others were willing to accept as historical all those portions of the legends that seemed plausible, some even maintaining that the Buddhist legends preserved "in a large measure a genuine historical tradition."
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Excerpted from The Legend of King Asoka by John S. Strong. Copyright © 1983 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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