Asoka

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Asoka (reigned ca. 273-232 B.C.), the third emperor of the Maurya dynasty, is considered ancient India's greatest ruler. He combined the piety of a saint with the practical qualities of a king, and in the history of Buddhism he ranks second only to Buddha.

By the 3d century B.C. the kingdom of Magadha under the hegemony of the Mauryas controlled almost the entire Indian subcontinent. Only the southern tip of India and Ceylon remained free of the Mauryas' political influence. However, Buddhist missionaries of Asoka extended religious influence into Ceylon, which became a stronghold of Theravada Buddhism through Asoka's efforts.

In his youth Asoka served as viceroy of Taxila and later of Ujain. He came to the throne in 273 B.C., but a disputed succession delayed his coronation until 269. In 261 he annexed Kalinga, a vast tract between the Mahanadi and Godavari rivers, killing over 100,000 people and taking 150,000 captives. This was the only aggressive war of his reign, and so shocked the King's conscience that 4 years later he publicly recorded on various edicts his profound sorrow and remorse. He devoted the rest of his life to the propagation of dharma, the Buddhist law of piety.

Life and Beliefs

To bring his precepts into harmony with his personal practice, Asoka gave up hunting, royal luxuries, and the use of meat in the royal kitchen. He established and endowed hospitals for men and animals, both within his own realm and in those of the neighboring powers. On the highways banyan trees were planted to provide shade, mango groves were laid to provide fruit, wells were dug, watering places constructed, and rest houses established to comfort weary men and animals.

He made pilgrimages to India's holy places, preaching the law of piety to his subjects along the way. Often he was absent from his capital for as long as 10 months. He appointed a special class of officers, dharma mahamatras, to propagate morality. He asked them to be teachers first, magistrates afterward. Declaring all his subjects to be his children, he considered himself to be the trustee of their welfare rather than a ruler. But Asoka, while utilizing the full force of his administration, recognized frankly that permanent improvement was to be based on genuine change of heart, not on royal measures. He exhorted his subjects to meditate; to practice nonviolence and noninjury toward fellowmen and animals; to revere parents, teachers, mendicants, and elders; to be kind to inferiors such as servants, serfs, and beasts of burden; to be truthful; and to respect the beliefs of fellowmen. He did not seek to establish a sectarian creed and lavishly gave to all religious sects.

Monuments of Faith

From the sixteenth year of his reign Asoka permanently recorded ethical doctrines by inscribing them on rocks, sandstone pillars, and cave walls in the various regional languages. There were Fourteen Rock Edicts incised at seven different places in the remoter provinces of the empire. Some of these are preserved practically complete to this day. The second great series is that of Seven Pillar Inscriptions, six of which exist in six copies each, engraved on monolithic sandstone pillars erected at various localities in the home provinces. The seventh, perhaps the most important edict, is found on one pillar only. The remaining inscriptions consist of two Kalinga Edicts in two recensions, or critical revisions, three Cave Inscriptions, two Tarai Pillar Inscriptions, and several minor pillar and rock edicts in several recensions. The number of distinct documents is perhaps 35. Some inscriptions are in Greek and Aramaic. Bilingual inscriptions have been discovered on many pillars, making possible the decipherment of Brahmi and Kharosthi scripts. Many of the pillars contain Arabic numerals, India's gift to mathematics.

Asoka is reported to have built over 8,000 temples and more than 1,000 stupas, or tombs in honor of the Buddha. The stupa at Bhilsa still survives. The surviving gray sandstone pillars of his palace at Patliputra (modern Patna) display marvelous technical execution and brilliant art detail. The huge blocks of hard stone have an exquisite polish unmatched in India since the Asokan era. Asoka's lion seal carved on the Sarnath pillar has become modern India's state seal, and Asoka's wheel is represented on the central stripe of India's flag.

Anxious to spread his message across India, Asoka sent embassies to the Near East. His edicts mention Antiochus II, Theos of Syria, Ptolemy II, Philadelphos of Egypt, Magas of Cyrene, Antigonos Gonatas of Macedonia, and Alexander of Epirus. His son Mahendra and daughter Samghamitra went to Ceylon, which has been a Buddhist country since. A mission was sent to Burma, while others went to the Himalayan region and beyond. On the Indian subcontinent he sent his views to the Cola, Cera, and Pandya rulers.

Asoka's Empire

The empire Asoka ruled comprised, in modern terminology, Afghanistan south of the Hindu Kush, Baluchistan, Sind, Kashmir, the area of the lower Himalayas, and the whole of India and Pakistan proper except the southern extremity below the latitude of Madras. The central regions were governed directly from Patliputra, the outlying domains were divided among four viceroys, who were close relatives of the imperial family. A council of ministers advised the King, but in addition there was a well-defined bureaucratic structure, and five cadres are mentioned. In spite of Asoka's personal commitment to nonviolence, a standing army was maintained, the Kalinga Edict clearly enjoined people not to rebel for the Emperor "even in his remorse" had the power to crush them, and the death penalty was retained.

Not much is known about Asoka's family life. His inscriptions speak of two queens; Buddhist legends mention several. Very little is known about his sons, and how many they were. It is also not known how, when, and where the king-turned-evangelist died. A Tibetan tradition maintains that he died at Taxila. Two grandsons, Dasratha and Samprathi, succeeded him and divided the empire. But within 50 years of Asoka's death, a Brahmanical reaction, led by Pusyamitra, brought the dynasty to an end.

Further Reading

The most authoritative study of Asoka is Romila Thapar, Asoka and the Decline of the Mauryas (1961), which contains complete translations of the known inscriptions. B. G. Gokhale, Asoka Maurya (1966), discusses the influence of Asoka's personal philosophy on his empire. Asoka is discussed at length in Gertrude Emerson Sen, The Pageant of India's History (1948). See also Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (1946).

(Sanskrit; Pāli, Asoka). Grandson of Candragupta Maurya, son of Bindusāra, and third incumbent of the Mauryan throne, c.272-231 bce. Aśoka is famous for the edicts he ordered to be carved on rocks and pillars throughout his kingdom. A total of 33 inscriptions have been found which provide invaluable historical and chronological information on early Indian Buddhist history (see Edicts of Aśoka). He was a great patron of Buddhism, and it can be seen from the Edicts that the content of Aśoka's Dharma is essentially that of a lay Buddhist. Dharma consists, he tells us, of ‘Few sins and many good deeds of kindness, liberality, truthfulness and purity’ (Pillar Edict 2). In his edicts Aśoka offers fatherlike advice to his subjects, commending moral virtues such as peacefulness, piety, religious tolerance, zeal, respect for parents and teachers, courtesy, charity, sense-control, and equanimity. No reference is made to the technical aspects of Buddhist doctrine as expounded in the Four Noble Truths. Aśoka relates in Rock Edict XIII that after his bloody conquest of the Kaliṇga region of north-east India, he repented of his warlike ways and became a lay Buddhist. From then on he attempted to rule according to Dharma as a ‘Dharma-rāja’ or righteous king (see cakravartin). He appointed officers known as ‘superintendents of Dharma’ (dharma-mahāmātra) to propagate the religion. However, in the best tradition of Indian kingship, Aśoka supported all religions. One of the edicts towards the end of his reign, known as the ‘schism edict’, condemns schism in the Saṃgha and speaks of monks being expelled. This seems to confirm accounts in Buddhist chronicles of his involvement in a council at Pāṭaliputra around 250 bce, reckoned as the ‘Third Council’ by the Theravāda tradition (see Council of Pāṭaliputra II). The edicts also record that Aśoka sent ambassadors to five named kings reigning in the Hellenistic world, which again seems to support the Buddhist tradition that he did much to promote the spread of the religion. He is credited with sending his son Mahinda, himself a monk, to Sri Lanka to establish Buddhism there, as well as sending missionaries to other parts of south-east Asia. After Aśoka's death in 231 bce Mauryan rule rapidly declined and in the 2nd century bce the north and north-west were extensively invaded by Greeks from the former Seleucid satrapies of Bactria and Parthia, as well as by central Asian nomadic tribes. Various Aśokan emblems, such as the lion capital found on his pillars, have been adopted for official use by the modern state of India.

Quotes:

"I have enforced the law against killing certain animals and many others, but the greatest progress of righteousness among men comes from the exhortation in favor of non-injury to life and abstention from killing living beings."