Indian Emperor
who elevated Buddhism to the official state religion.
Quote:
from The
Extended Circle by Jon Wynne-Tyson. Direct link: amazon.co.uk
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 favour of non-injury
to life and abstention from killing living beings. - Asoka's Edicts
Extract
from India - a concise history, by Francis Watson
India a Concise
History
by Francis Watson
amazon.com (USA)
amazon.co.uk (UK)
Under Chadragupta [founder of the Mauryan dynasty] and his son Bindusura power
was pushed southwards, thrusting in some form as far as the Mysore plateau. To
be productive on this scale, military force required the organisation of an elaborately
authoritarian state.
. . . On these remarkable foundations the great Emperor
Ashoka, second in succession from Chandragupta, built something of a different
quality. The edicts carved for Ashoka, with a clearly permanent intent, upon imperishable
rock, the inscriptions upon the pillars of inimitably polished sandstone which
he set up throughout his vast dominions, yield a new concept of kingship and indeed
of the nature of man. Even when the Arthashastra's robust avoidance of cant has
been conceded, its cynicism is rebuked in the contemplation of the Ashokan model:
an equitable society in which the function of absolutism is translated by the
ruler as 'the debt that I owe to all living creatures'.
During his first
few years as emperor, Ashoka, who had previously served as governor in two secondary
capitals, Taxila and Ujjain, maintained the methods of his predecessors and exerted
himself to round off their legacy of an empire stretching from sea to sea, and
from Kashmir to the southern Deccan, somewhat north of the present alignment of
Madras and Bangalore. All that was required was the final and hard-fought subjection
of the Kalingas (occupying today's Orissa on the Bay of Bengal). And it was this
operation which provoked what one of his inscriptions described as 'His Sacred
Majesty's remorse . . . because the conquest of a country hitherto unsubdued involves
the slaughter, death and carrying away captive of the people'. The 'Law of Piety'
which he thereupon adopted, and inculcated in the three or four peaceful decades
remaining to his reign, was a public acceptance of the message preached two centuries
before by the Buddha whose name, however, was nowhere mentioned in the inscriptions.
The postulate of a moral political economy, substituting for violent suppression
a practical assault on poverty and insecurity, is one of the early features of
the Buddhist canon, not implausibly ascribed to Gautama himself Ashoka's public
works - the provision of free hospitals and veterinary clinics, bathing-tanks,
wells and drinking places for cattle, shade trees and rest-houses for road travellers
- were acts of social compassion without respect to quick returns. His revulsion
from warfare, in an empire freed for the time from internal threats, reduced an
extravagant army to a defence force concentrated where it might be needed, in
the north-west. For the peace and settlement of his dominions, especially of the
tribal areas, Ashoka introduced a new class of travelling supervisors (Kosambi
translates them as 'High Commissioners of Equity') responsible for examining and
redressing complaints on a basis of regard for the needs and customs of particular
groups and minorities. Caste was something about which none of the Maurya dynasty
seemed rigid (Chandragupta is thought to have been of mixed origin), but the tyrannizing
bureaucracy of the system had produced social tensions, and Ashoka's evident objective
was the reconciliation of classes. He restored the neglected routine of administrative
reports, which he was ready at all times to receive and study, and he required
the higher civil servants to make quinquennial tours of the different regions.
His own wide and frequent journeys helped to temper the centralization of a system
in which the only appearance of the ruler in the countryside had been in war or
the lavish pursuit of game.
Ashoka's abandonment of the royal tradition of
the chase was in line with the reverence for animal life that he showed by a vegetarian
table. To his subjects blood sacrifices were forbidden, but hunting was not, except
of 'non-edible' beasts and birds on protected lists. Outside the imperial household
beef and other meat was openly available: the cow was not then sacred.
Buddhism
did not become a state religion - a concept foreign to Indian ideas, then as now;
but the movement grew rapidly with the prestige of Ashoka's support, and became
known beyond India with the Emperor's missionary-embassies to Seleucid Syria,
Ptolemaic Egypt and other Hellenistic kingdoms, Ceylon (where he sent his own
son) and probably Nepal. Several of the innumerable stupas set up in Ashoka's
reign were regarded as his personal foundation, among them the inner brick core
of the Great Stupa at Sanchi. The multiplying monasteries were self-governing
institutions, protected and at intervals guided by the ruler, but mainly financed
- now that the rule against cash offerings had lapsed - by the laity, rich and
poor. The Jains (bitter rivals in the Buddhist chronicles) also enjoyed Ashoka's
patronage, pillar, and he was on good terms with the brabman priesthood, with
whom remained the ritual functions connected with birth, death, marriage and at
an initiation which like sacrifices were rejected in the Buddha's doctrine.
Another religious group that flourished under the benign Emperor was the resolutely
independent ascetic sect of the Ajivikas. The Barabar caves in Bihar, assigned
to Ajivika use by Ashoka, are the earliest in the great succession of India's
rock-cut architecture. Like the railings and gates at Sanchi they imitate in stone
the wooden structures which in Ashoka's reign began to be replaced also by free-standing
buildings of stone. One of the fine commemorative columns, carved at this time,
under evident Persian influence, bears on one of its capitals a group of four
lions, today the emblem of the Republic of India.