Author: Nayanjot Lahiri
Publisher: (Sri Lankan Edition) published by Sailfish 2015
Ashokavadana is a Sanskrit book written in the 2nd century CE. I will use (AV) to identify this book.
The Shramana Bhawath Gauthama Buddha was the first sage to predict the arrival of the Ashoka. “Here Buddha is shown as having encountered an earlier avatara of Ashoka in the city of Rajagriha. Ashoka was, when thus encountered, a young boy, Jaya by name, who lived in the city of Rajagriha, which the sage had entered seeking alms. Walking along Rajagriha’s main thoroughfare, the Buddha saw two young boys playing in dirt. One of them Jaya, on seeing the Buddha, decided to place a handful of dirt in his begging bowl and said “I would become king and, after placing the earth under a single umbrella of sovereignty, I would pay homage to the blessed Buddha”. […] Soon thereafter the Buddha predicted to his disciple Ananda that a hundred years after his death “that boy will become a king named Ashoka in the city of Pataliputra. He will be a righteous dharmaraja, a chakravartin who rules over one of the four continents, and he will distribute my relics far and wide and build the eighty-four thousand dharmarajikas.” (AV)(page 29)
During the reign of the emperor Bindusara, fortune tellers predicted a daughter of a Brahmin from Champa would marry a king and bear two jewel-like sons:one would become a chakrawartin ruling over one of the four continents, the other would wander forth and fulfill his religious vows.” (AV)(page 32)
The concubines in Bindusara’s court prevented the beautiful daughter of the Brahmana from getting closer to the emperor. They forced her to become a barber. She did it with such a skill that the emperor began to relax completely and fall asleep. Since her grooming gave him so much pleasure, Bindusara granted her a wish. She revealed to him that she is not a barber but a daughter of a Brahmana and the king subsequently made her his chief queen. (AV)
Later, when Ashoka was a young prince an Ajivaka named Pingalavatsajiva who examined Bindusara’s sons realized that Ashoka would succeed Bindusara and revealed this prediction to his mother. (AV)
Apparently, there were three major doctrines in India at the time, namely, Sharamana, Brahamana, and Ajivaka.
[A ‘vanished Indian religion’ is how the doctrine of the Ajivakas was described by A. L. Basham, the pre-eminent authority on this sect, and he says ‘vanished’ because the religion, unlike other faiths with ancient roots, has no modern adherents. This extinct sect’s founder was a religious leader called Makkhali Goshala who lived in the sixth century BCE. (page 35)]
Bindusara sent young Ashoka as a viceroy to Taxila for few years and then as a viceroy to Malva in central India. Ashoka met a beautiful daughter of a prominent city merchant (Vayshya) in Vidisha on the way to Ujjayini in Malwa. The Deepavansa puts it blandly: the daughter of a Setthi, known by the name of Devi, having cohabited with him, gave birth to a most noble son. A later account (Lines 6, 8, and 12 of the Hathigumpha inscription of Kharavela) is positively loquacious by comparison: Ashoka, it says, made her his wife; and she was (afterwards) with child by him and born in Ujjeni a beautiful boy, Mahinda, and when two years has passed (she bore) a daughter, Samghamita. (page 97)
Some ten years after Ashoka became the governor of Ujjayini, the emperor Bindusara became critically ill. The decision to ensure the Bindusara’s eldest son Susima would not succeed him is traced back to a slight that the King’s prime minister suffered at the hands of Susema, the hair apparent. It seems the prince slapped the bold head of the minister in jest. The minister, however, was not amused and formed a coalition hostile to the ‘jester’. The turn of events is described: “Today he slaps me with his hand”, the minister reflected, “when he becomes king he’ll let fall his sward! I had better take action now to ensure that he does not inherit the throne.”. He therefore sought to alienate five hundred ministers from Susima, and saying to them “It has been predicted that Ashoka will become chakravartin ruler over one of the four continents. When the time comes, let us place him on the throne.” (AV)(page 102)
The clique from Bindusara’s time which has helped Ashoka become king had begun to treating him with contempt. Asoka passed an absurd order for his minsters to comply to test their loyalty. Despite being repeated three times the order was not carried out. Consequently, Ashoka is said to have personally cut off the heads of ‘five hundred’ ministers. (AV)(page 105)
Ashoka was greatly effected by the carnage at Kalinga. Unlike any other victorious rulers, remorseful Ashoka started to “speak” about the horrors at Kalinga and transformed himself into a completely different ruler. His own voice still survives in rock inscriptions, inscriptions in pillars, and inscriptions in slabs all over India. This emperor’s voice is the subject of the book from the 6th chapter onwards.
About 50 inscriptions of Ashoka have been found so far. The substance of the Girnar rock edicts in Gujarat is given below.
Fourteen edicts which concern diverse subjects: protection of animals from mindless sacrifice; reduction in royal meat consumption, centrality of dhamma; inauguration of dhamma yathras; Kalinga war and its atonement; denunciation of social rituals regarded as superficial; proper courtesy to all kinds of people ranging from slaves to Brahmans; cessation in killings of living beings; public culture in which every sect honours every other; king’s power to punish forest dwellers; spread of dhammic message to borders and states beyond borders; a foreign policy based on welfare measures; creation of senior officials called dharma-mahamathras. (Pages 308 and 309)
Nayanjot takes the reader from Ashoka’s earlier edicts to his last edict in chronological order pointing out that Ashoka’s massage too evolved through the years. The edicts in Taxila was written both in Brahmi characters and in Greek. There was a large population of Greeks living in Taxila at the time.
Ashoka’s voice fell silent after his last pillar edict at Lumbini. Ashoka died about 10 years after his last edict. (It is possible that newer inscriptions are yet to be found.)
Ashoka’s wives became more prominent during that later years of his life. A queen named Kuruvaki is mentioned in one of the late epigraphs. The image of Kuruvaki is of a self-possessed and strong-willed consort wanting an act of philanthropy recorded as specifically as hers. (page 283) Ashokavadana mentions another wife Tishya-raksha. Apparently, because Ashoka offered his most precious jewels to Bodhi, she thought Bodhi was a woman. She was incensed because ‘although the king pursues his pleasure with me, he sends all the best jewels to Bodhi’s place. She paid money to a sorceress to destroy Bodhi. The sorceress chanted some mantras and tied a thread around the Bodhi. The tree began to wither and Ashoka fainted when the news reached him. Upon regaining consciousness the heartbroken monarch said he would die if the Bodhi perished. When Thishyarakshshitha consoled the sorrowful king by saying that if Bodhi died she would pleasure him, he realized how ignorant she was: “Bodhi is not a woman”, said the king, “but a tree; it is where the Blessed One attained unsurpassed enlightenment. Realizing her mistake, the queen summoned the sorceress to revive the tree and the dying tree was restored to life. (page 284)
The book is a historical analysis of Ashoka’s voice found among the inscriptions. It is a very good book in that sense. It would have been nice if she had provided maps of the locations mentioned in the book. As a non-Indian reader I had to spend a considerable amount of time googling to find information and locations of these places. I also felt some discomfort throughout the book. I identify two defects in the book for this discomfort. The author has a bias towards Hindu religion and she is also suffering from “post July 83 syndrome”. [This is a term I coined to those scholars who find it necessary to de-emphasize the value of chronicles like Mahawansa. Late Stanley Tambiah, and Gananath Obesekere have shown symptoms of post July 83 syndrome.]
This is how Najanjot ends her story.
For all we know, if knowledge of Ashoka’s words had survived in all their nuances—as did the memory of Ashoka’s Buddhist avatara—he may have been remembered as the founder of a unique political model of humane governance, one which would have been closer to the historical emperor. But in this respect the afterlife of Ashoka, like his real life, remains poised between legend and the truth.
Nayanjot is an historian at the Ashoka University, which is a private research university located in Sonipat, Haryana, India. She has won John F. Richards Price (2016) and the Infosys Price (2013) for this book. Her Infosys Science Foundation Lecture given at the Madras Institute of Development Studies can be found in the following link.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EA6bDI0xgCs&feature=youtu.be
The following are some of the revelations/findings that I thought was interesting.
(1) The Lost religion (Ajivaka) of Makkhali Ghosala.
(2) Barbar caves located near the Patna-Gaya road. There are four caves and at least one of them is donated to Ajivakas by Ashoka. (The Barbar mountain was known as Khalatika mountain during Ashoka's time.)
(3) Megasthenes identified the Sona river as “Erraonboas”. Archeologists have discovered that Sona river joined Ganga near Patna in Ashoka’s time. Sona is a shorten name for “Swarna”. The river was known as “Swarna Bhoo” river in the past. Erraonboas must be a mispronounciation of “Swarna Bhoo”. (Megasthenes stayed at Pataliputhra for about six months during the Chandraguptha’s reign. He identified the Emperor Chandraguptha as Sandrakottos.) Is there any reference to Swarna Bhoo river in the Buddhist literature?
(4) According to Megasthenes all personal bodyguards of the emperor were women.
(5) There was a Mauryan tank constructed during the reign of Chandraguptha by building a brick dam across the Swarna Rekha river (Sonarekka river) in Junagadh. Could it be possible that the tank building technology was brought to Sri Lanka by the engineers that may have come with the Mahinda thero?
(6) Swarna Rekha tank was the only tank built by the Mauryas in India. They built more “vavas” than tanks. Vava means a well and the Adi-Chanda vava in Uparkot has depth of 41 meters from top to bottom.
(7) Lakha Medi sthupa was excavated by J. M. Campbell in 1889. He made a massive cut through the stupa and found some relics. These relics are in Jungadh State Museum now.
(8) There is a pillared hall at the Kamrahar locality in Patna. This could be the place where the 3rd Buddhist Council was held. (Saranath pillar edict has a reference to “Samgabheda” among the monks and the nuns.)
(9) The Sanchi vihara in Ujjayini could be the “Chathiyagiri”, where Devi took their son Mahinda before he set out on a Buddhist mission to Sri Lanka.
(10) King Rupa Malla of the Naga Dynasty made a pilgrimage to Lumbini in 1312 CE and inscribed “Om Mani Padme Hum” on the Ashoka Pillar.
(11) Gotihawa located between Kapilawasthu and Lumbini was one of the places where 1/8th of Buddha’s relics were taken after the cremation of the body of the Buddha. Excavations reveled a 3rd century BCE brick sthupa at this location. A broken Ashoka Pillar has also been found at this location. Why was Gotihawa so important in early Buddhist history?
I have picked up two books mentioned by Nayanjot. They are “The Buddha and the Sahibs” and “Ashoka—The Search for India’s Lost Emperor” by Charles Allen.
No comments:
Post a Comment