The Buddha and the Sahibs

Author: Charles Allen
Publisher: John Murray Paperbacks 2003

This is the story of the “Orientalists” who have discovered the India’s lost history, lost Emperor Ashoka, and the Buddha dhamma that thrived in India during his time.  Their methods of discovery were crude, sometimes outright criminal in today’s standards.  There were honest sahibs who spent their whole life for science and discovery, and there were opportunistic and greedy sahibs whose only objective was to look for fortunes.  Charles Allen has woven a tale of discoveries in a way that takes the reader along the path of the discoveries while (mostly)letting the reader judge the worthiness of actions of the sahibs.

The heroes are William “Oriental” Jones who established the Asiatic Society of Bengal, James Princsep who deciphered the Ashoka edits, George Turnour who translated Mahawansa from Pali to English, Alexander Cunningham who discovered many of the Buddhist pilgrimage sites, and John Marshall who finally introduced proper methods of archeological excavations.

Prinsep tried to decipher the pseudo-Greek lettering first identified on the pillar known as the “Feroz Shah’s lat, later referred to as Delhi No 1. He was unsuccessful for 4 years.  The breakthrough came when he examined the two dozen brief inscriptions of the same lettering at the Great Tope at Sanchi.  Prinsep decided that these short inscriptions could only be records of donations.

Prinsep was struck by the fact that almost all short transcripts ended with same two characters: a snake-like squiggle and an inverted T followed by a single dot.  He also noticed that a single letter (looks like a mirror image of the letter y) appeared frequently before or near the the terminal word — and, as luck would have it, he observed the same letter on some coins from Saurashtra which he determined to mean “of” the equivalent of Pali “ssa”.  If his hunch were correct then the general structure of each sentence was something like “So-and-so of, the gift”.  On 23 May, 1837 Prinsep wrote an excited note to Alexander Cunningham:

My dear Cunningham:

Hons de department de mes etudes! … No, but I can read Delhi No 1 which is of more importance; the Sanchi inscriptions have enlightened me.  Each line engraved on a separate pillar or railing.  Then I thought, they must be gifts of private individuals where names will be recorded.  All end in “two letters”—that must mean “gift” or “given”.  A translation of a such sentence is: “Isa-palitasa-cha Samanasa-cha danam” (The gift of Isa-Palita and of Samana.)

The opening sentence of Delhi No 1 had been observed to repeat itself over and over again at the start of great many sections or paragraphs of text in the pillar inscriptions and on the Girnar and Dauli rocks.  This Prinsep could now read as “Devanampiya piyadasi laja hevam aha”. 

 

Here he observed that the language is not Sanskrit but a vernacular modification of it, which has been so fortunately preserved in Pali scriptures of Ceylon and Ava.  (Ava was a kingdom in Burma.)  After conferring with Ratna Paula, his Pali-speaker from Ceylon, Prinsep had concluded that this opening phrase was best represented in English as “Thus spake King Piyadasi, Beloved of the Gods”.

But who was the author of these extraordinary edicts?  Who is Piyadasi?  Prisep couldn’t find a Piyadasi in all Hindu genealogical tables that he consulted.  Only one possible candidate presented himself, one who had emerged from George Turnour’s translations of the Pali Chronicles of Ceylon:  King Devanampeatissa succeeded his father on the throne of Ceylon in the year of Buddha 236.  He induced Dharmasoka, a sovereign of the many kingdoms into which Dambadiva was divided, and who’s capital was Pataliputta, to depute his son Mahinda and his daughter Sangamitta, with several other principal priests to Anuradhapura for the purpose of introducing the religion of Buddha.

On June 6th Turnour sent a letter to Prinsep.  “Since coming to Colombo, I have made a most important discovery”, wrote Turnour.  While sorting through a collection of Pali works brought to Ceylon from Siam by a Sinhalese official in 1812 he had found following lines in reference to Dharma Ashoka.  “Here then we find Ashoka was surnamed Piyadassi; and if you will turn to the fifth chapter of the Mahawanso, especially pages 28 and 29, you will find the circumstances under which the Buddhistical edifices were simultaneously erected all over India”. (page 188)

Let me finish this note by pointing out that not all Sahibs were good.  

James Campbell, the Commissioner of Customs, Salt, Opium and Akbari in Bombay Presidency in the 1890s, excavated several sites in Gujarat.  Among his early triumphs was finding a new Ashokan rock edict—it was taken to bits, mislaid, and lost—and a relic subsequently identified by the accompanying inscription as a segment of Buddha’s alms bowl—it was thrown away.  He then moved on to tear apart the “Girnar Mound”, a large stupa a few miles south of the famous Girnar rock inscription discovered by James Tod in 1812. (page 256)

Ps.

අන්ද්‍රා ප්‍රදෙශයේ පිහිටි ක්‍රි. ව. 200 දී පමණ ඉදිකර ඇති අමරාවතී නම් වූ විහාරස්ථානයේ නටබුන් 1800 පමණ වනතෙක් ආරක්ෂා වී තිබින.  (ලංකාවට දන්ත ධාතුව වැඩම කිරීමට පෙර, එය අමරාවතියෙහි තැන්පත් කර තිබිනැයි කියවේ.)

1797 දී කර්නල් කොලින් මැකෙන්සි අමරාවතිය පරීක්ෂා කිරීමට පැමිණි අවස්ථාව ගැන මෙසේ සඳහන් වේ.

While surveying in Madras and Hyderabad, Mackenzie received reports that slabs of finely-carved stone were being used as construction materials by a local princeling, the Raja of Chintapalli, in the process of building a new town beside a temple of Shiva.  He arrived at the village of Amaravathi to find the Raja’s workmen digging into the vast circular hill well over five hundred feet in circumference with a solid core composed of bricks.  A section of the lower rim of the hill had been exposed, and revealed a wall of finely-carved stones unlike anything he has seen before.  

The Raja noted that Mackenzie eagerly inspect the place, thought it might conceal something of value.  Raja commanded the mussulmen who were living there to move elsewhere, as he designed to form a garden there and a reservoir at the center.  

ජාවා රටේ පැවැති යුද්ධයකට සහභාගී වූ මැකෙන්සි ඔහුගේ කණ්ඩායමක් සමග 1816 දී අමරාවතියට නැවත පැමිණ ඇත.  ඔහු දැක ඇත්තේ සිත් කම්පා වන දර්ශනයකි.

The hill he had watched being excavated for its bricks by the Raja of Chintapalli was now little more than a shell, with a large tank or square reservoir dug into the centre.  It was obvious that this was indeed the remains of what Mackenzie termed a “tope”.  It was also clear that the tope had once been entirely surrounded by a paved walkway some twelve feet broad, enclosed inside and out by by a monumental stone colonnade.  Most of the stone from this colonnade has gone; large number of pillars and beams had been used to form a flight steps leading down to a nearby bathing tank, while hundreds of slabs had ended in the walls of a nearby Saivite temple and other buildings.

A cursory dig by Mackenzie uncovered one last section of the railing still in place, made up about a hundred and thirty pillars and slabs in all, every one a work of art “very neatly executed.”  (ඉහත ඇති පින්තූර බලන්න.)

ඊට පසු අමරාවතියට ගිය ඉංග්‍රීසි ජතිකයා වෝල්ටර් එලියට ය. ඒ 1845 දීය. ඔහු දුටු දේ හද කකිය වන සුළු ය.

“Every fragment of former excavations” had been “carried away and burnt into lime”.

දැන් අමරාවතිය තිබූ තැන දෑවැන්ත බුදු පිළිමයක් අඹා ඇත.  මෙය ප්‍රාන්ත රජය පෙර කරන ලද පව් සෝදා ගැනීමේ තැතක් විය හැක.

This is an excellent book, and in my opinion, that must be in any Sri Lankan’s private library.