Aśoka

Indian king (r. c. 273/265-c. 238 b.c.e.)

• Born: c. 302 b.c.e.
• Birthplace: Probably near Pātaliputra, Magadha, India
• Died: c. 238 b.c.e.
• Place of death: Unknown

Through energetic and enlightened administration of his kingdom, Aśoka spread the Buddhist faith in all directions and, by means of his Rock, Pillar, and Cave edicts, provided India, the districts surrounding India, and, ultimately, the entire world with an example of regal compassion that is as admirable as it is rare.

Early Life

What can be known of the life of Aśoka (ah-SOH-kah) derives from two primary sources: first, the legends that sprang up during and after his death (and which are often suspected of helping to grind certain zealous religious axes); second, Aśoka’s own “sermons in stone,” the thirty-five edicts that he began issuing in 260 b.c.e. and that were inscribed on rocks, pillars hewn from sandstone, and the walls of caves in the Barabar Hills of ancient Magadha. Therefore, only a very fragmentary early life can be pieced together. There is much to be left to conjecture and little to be known with certainty.

Aśoka was the son of Bindusara and the grandson of Chandragupta Maurya, the founder of the Mauryan Dynasty and consolidator of a great empire that included all northern India as far west as the Hindu Kush. A charming legend is told of the naming of Aśoka. His mother, who may have been named Subhadrangi, was supposedly kept away from the king’s bed by party politics. After finally having gained access to the bed, she bore the king a son and said thereafter, “I am without sorrow,” which is to say, in Sanskrit, “Aśoka.”

Aśoka is reputed to have been ungainly in appearance and, perhaps, to have been disliked by his father. In his early manhood, however, he was called on by Bindusara to put down a revolt in Taxila and from there to proceed to Ujjain to act as a viceroy.

Aśoka appears to have had numerous brothers and sisters, and, if certain Ceylonese legends are accepted, he was most cruel to his brothers in the process of jockeying for the succession to the throne, murdering ninety-nine of them before becoming king. Such an account, however, may well be part of the tradition of Chand Aśoka (Black Aśoka), the epithet intended to indicate that, before his conversion to Buddhism, he was a man whose ruthlessness and cruelty knew no bounds. That there was a struggle for the throne is supported by the fact that Aśoka’s accession to it (c. 273) occurred four years before his coronation. That blood might have been shed in the process of Aśoka’s becoming king seems not unlikely.

Xuanzang (Hsüan Tsang), a Chinese Buddhist pilgrim who traveled in India in the seventh century c.e., reports having seen a high pillar that commemorated the site of what had been called “Aśoka’s Hell,” a prison that housed a series of elaborate torture chambers. According to one of the legends, Aśoka’s enlightenment came about when he beheld a Buddhist holy man whose imperviousness to torture moved him to become aware in a painful way of his cruelty, to destroy the prison, and to relax the laws against criminals. Solider evidence, however, indicates that Aśoka’s conversion may rather have been the consequence of his beholding the extreme destructibility of the Kalinga people in southeastern India.

In 262, Aśoka fought and won a war against the Kalingas; in Rock Edict 13, referring to himself as “Priyadarsi, Beloved of the Gods,” he chronicled his conversion, noting that 150,000 persons were captured, 100,000 were slain, and many times that number had died from the general effects of the war. The havoc that the war had wreaked had caused Aśoka to become intensely devoted to the study, love, and inculcation of dharma. This intense devotion, coupled with his sorrow and regret, had led him to desire “security, self-control, impartiality, and cheerfulness for all living creatures.” He went on in the edict to announce a radical new program for his empire: He would abandon military conquest and would try to effect moral conquest in and among people.

Life’s Work

In 260, Aśoka issued the first of the Rock Edicts and made his first “pious tour.” Both edict and tour were part of his plan to endow his people with dharma. The concept of dharma is a complex one generally, and it becomes no simpler in Aśoka’s use of it. For him, it had to do both with his Buddhist underpinnings and with morality and righteousness in general. Dharma was something he did out of Buddhist piety; it was also a complex of responses to life available to non-Buddhists. It was a kind of ecosystem, a recognition that one’s well-being was closely and eternally connected with the well-being of everyone else. Aśoka’s attempt to promulgate this understanding represents a tremendous evolution in the moral development of humankind.

Aśoka had the edict written in the languages of the districts where they were to be placed. Monumental Prakrit, a kind of lingua franca for India at the time, was the primary language of the edicts, but on the western frontier of the kingdom, edicts written in Greek and Aramaic have been found. Noting that in past times rulers had made great pleasure trips through the land, Aśoka determined to embark on another series of tours, during which he would talk to people about dharma, visit the aged, and give gifts and money to those in need.

In 257, Aśoka appointed the first dharma-mahamatras, the officers of an institution charged with traveling about the kingdom and helping to spread the concept of dharma. Interestingly, these men were responsible for spreading the Aśokan notion of dharma through all sects; they were not supposed to attempt sectarian conversions but were rather to supervise the distribution of various gifts and to help promote conformity to the ideals of compassion, liberality, truthfulness, purity, gentleness, and goodness.

Aśoka worried about the almost reflexive tendency of people dedicated to a particular religion to quarrel over dogma, and some of his sternest statements in the edicts address this problem. In one inscription, he baldly proclaims that dissident nuns and monks must be expelled from their order. Aśoka recognized two ways in which people could advance in dharma: moral prescription and meditation. The teachers of any religion, be it Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, or any other, are always ready to provide moral prescription. So, in fact, was Aśoka, and he did so in the edicts. In Pillar Edict 7, however, he acknowledged that people make greater progress in dharma through practicing meditation than through heeding moral prescription.

There has been considerable argument concerning the precise nature of Aśoka’s religion. The edicts have little to say of doctrinaire Buddhism. Aśoka’s tolerance of other religions is declared clearly and eloquently in the inscriptions. He often spoke of svarga (Heaven) and the possibility of obtaining it through dharma. He had nothing to say on stone or pillar of nirvana, a veritable plank in the Buddhist platform. Some scholars have been led by these facts to suggest that Aśoka was—as Akbar was to be almost two thousand years later—a practitioner of some sort of universal religion. In many other ways, however, Aśoka strongly supported and promoted dharma as revealed in and through Buddhism, and his religion’s spread through western Asia during his reign was certainly in part a result of those tremendous administrative energies that helped further his humanitarian purposes.

Throughout the 250’s, Aśoka made moral tours, erected Buddhist shrines, and commissioned edicts. In 258-257, he issued in one body the fourteen Major Rock Edicts and granted cave dwellings to the Ajivikas, an order of Buddhist monks. In 250, he made a pilgrimage to Lumbinī Garden, the birthplace of the Buddha, and erected there a commemorative pillar. In 243-242, he issued the Pillar Edicts.

According to one account of Aśoka’s last days, by 238 he had lost his power to the high officials of the court. In his old age, Aśoka supposedly nominated as his successor Samprati, one of his grandsons. Under the influence of the usurping officers, Samprati proceeded to abuse his grandfather, reducing Aśoka’s allowances so drastically that, finally, for dinner the aging king would be sent only half an amalaka fruit on an earthen plate. How or where Aśoka died remains a matter of conjecture but that he died in straitened circumstances seems likely.

Significance

That might makes right is an idea that has been taken for granted by such historical leaders as Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Genghis Khan. What made Aśoka great was his grasping another truth and giving it life in third century India. In Rock Edict 13, he asserted that “the chiefest conquest is the conquest of Right and not of Might,” and he went on to make his deeds commensurate with his rock-inscribed words. He abolished war within his empire immediately after he had subdued the Kalingas. He never fought another one.

That he desired to civilize both his people and neighboring peoples is made clear by the testimony of the edicts; the usual formula, however, the one that equates civilization of a people with subjugation, did not apply. Aśoka did not give up entirely the idea that chastisement may on occasion be necessary, though, for he reminded the forest people who had come under his sway that they must grow in dharma, and he reserved the right to exercise punishment, despite having repented of his violent ways, in order to make them cease their criminal behavior. The edicts of Aśoka reveal a fascinating blend of the practical and the ideal, the proud and the humble; they record the workings of a complex mind.

Writing of Aśoka in The Outline of History (1921), H. G. Wells judged:

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 Aśoka 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 to-day than have ever heard the names of Constantine or Charlemagne.

The high-flown rhetoric of this passage ought not to bias one against the beauty of its vision. If most people do not today cherish the memory of Aśoka above the memories of Constantine the Great and Charlemagne, that fact is perhaps a measure of the modern world’s bad taste in heroes.

Bibliography

Bhandarkar, D. R. Aśoka. Ottawa: Laurier Books, 2001. A spirited and, at times, combative rehearsal of Aśoka’s life and works, dealing especially well with the Aśokan concept of dharma and according Aśoka a high place in history. Contains translations of the Rock and Pillar Edicts accompanied by detailed notes.

Campbell, Joseph. The Masks of God: Oriental Mythology. New York: Penguin, 1976. This volume contains a brief but luminous discussion of Aśoka, comparing the destiny of Buddhism under Aśoka to that of Christianity under Constantine the Great and noting the absence from the Rock Edicts of certain fundamental Buddhist doctrines.

Durant, Will. Our Oriental Heritage. New York: MJF, 1992. Durant presents a respectful but slightly skeptical account of the life of Aśoka, seeing the seeds of the downfall of the Mauryas in the very piety of Aśoka that is so admired. Provides an especially vivid description, by way of Xuanzang, of “Aśoka’s Hell.”

Mookerji, Radhakumud. Aśoka. 3d ed. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1962. A scholarly biography that, like Bhandarkar’s book, accords Aśoka a high place in the moral annals of humankind. It contains copiously annotated translations of the Rock and Pillar Edicts and three cave inscriptions as well as appendices concerning the chronology of the edicts and the scripts, dialects, and grammar of the texts.

Nikam, N. A., and Richard McKeon. The Edicts of Aśoka. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. This handy translation of all the edicts, except for the Queen’s Edict and some variants of the minor edicts, also features a brief introduction that makes interesting comparisons between Aśoka and other great world figures such as Hammurabi, Charlemagne, Akbar, and Marcus Aurelius.

Thapar, Romila. Aśoka and the Decline of the Mauryas. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. A thorough study of the life and times of Aśoka, featuring an account of the disrepair into which his empire fell after his death. Includes numerous valuable appendices concerning the historical record of Aśoka’s period based on pottery and coins, the geographical locations of the edicts, and the titles of Aśoka. Includes a translation of the edicts.

Wells, H. G. The Outline of History. Rev. ed. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971. A vivid and highly laudatory account of Aśoka, allotting him a more significant place in history than that of Alexander the Great and arguing that the epithet “great” is more properly applied to Aśoka.