Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor (14 page)

What is different about this portrayal of the Wheel-turning Monarch is that he is shown in an act of reverence – and he is facing outwards, towards the viewer. The object of his reverence is missing. That was carved on the panel directly above him – which has failed to survive the damage done to Amaravati. This magnificent piece of marble first went on display at the Paris Exhibition in 1867 but its full significance only became apparent sixty years later.

The Chakravartin bas-relief, probably dating from the first century CE, a masterpiece now in the British Museum’s Amaravati marbles gallery. (British Museum)

What these surviving images from Amaravati tell us is that the cult of the Wheel-turning Monarch was well established within the Mahayana Buddhist tradition in India at an early age. From India it would spread north to China and beyond.

The so-called Great Tope at Sanchi, with details, as drawn by William Murray and engraved by James Prinsep for publication in the
Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal
in 1837.

The old fortress at Jaffna, on the northernmost tip of Sri Lanka, was once said to be the strongest in Asia. Today it lies in ruins, having suffered bombardment from land, sea and air. It had been built originally by the Portuguese to control the sea lanes leading to and from the Spice Islands of the East Indies, including the island of Lanka itself – which they renamed
Ceilao
, from the local
Sinhalana
or ‘Land of the Lion’. In 1658, Portuguese survivors of the siege of Colombo briefly found refuge here before being expelled from the island by its new rulers, the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, known to the British as the Dutch East India Company. The Dutch further strengthened the fortifications, so that by the time the British took over in 1796 there was very little for them to do but change flags.

What became known as the Dutch Fort remained in an excellent state of preservation until the insurgency initiated in July 1983 by the separatists popularly known as the Tamil Tigers developed into a civil war. Jaffna and its fort became the scene of some of the fiercest fighting, twice changing hands in the course of a bitter, long-drawn-out war that only finally came to an end in May 2009.

Somewhere in all the rubble is the grave of Major the Hon. George Turnour, the younger son of an Irish earl, Lord Winterton. George Turnour had taken part in the capture of Jaffna from the Dutch as a lieutenant in the 73rd Regiment of Foot and had stayed on as the fort adjutant. He had married the daughter of a refugee French aristocrat and in March 1799 their son, also the Hon. George, was born in Jaffna Fort. Here the boy remained for some years before being sent to England to be educated. The father stayed on.

When the British took possession of the island they
Anglicised Ceilao into Ceylon. It might have become part of the EICo’s Indian possessions but for the scruples of the British government, increasingly vexed by its inability to rein in its Governors General in India. So Ceylon became a crown colony with its own administration, the Ceylon Civil Service, which was fortunate in having as its first governor the Hon. Frederick North. Like his contemporary in India, Marquess Wellesley, North was an aristocrat and an Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, man, and although he lacked Wellesley’s ambition he shared his view that the best administrators were men who aspired to work with the natives rather than over them. These included the French botanist Joseph de Joinville, the first foreigner to make a study of Buddhism in Ceylon, and Captain George Turnour himself, who served as a local administrator in and around Jaffna until his death in 1813 at the age of forty-five.

Another able member of North’s administration was the lawyer Alexander Johnston, Ceylon’s first advocate general and later chief justice, a man of great erudition but incapable of uttering a single sentence when two or three would do. Johnston might with some justification be termed Ceylon’s answer to Sir William Jones. He had spent his boyhood up to the age of eleven in Madras and Madurai and at one stage had been tutored informally by Colin Mackenzie, which may explain why as an adult in Ceylon he was said to have had an ‘insatiable curiosity about Tamil Saivism and Sinhalese Buddhism’.
¹
As advocate general, Johnston played the leading role in the abolition of the slave trade on the island and the establishment of trial by jury, and he paved the way for universal education. Like Jones in Calcutta, he was determined that local law should have its place within the judicial system
and to this end he made a study of ‘all the customary laws of the various religions and casts
[sic]
of Ceylon’, before drawing up what became the Ceylon Judicial Code.

In the course of pushing through his reforms Johnston formed a close friendship with a former slave-owner named Rajah Pakse, said to be the most powerful man on the island. When Johnston needed the cooperation of the elders of the Buddhist
Sangha
, or church, it was Rajah Pakse who interceded on his behalf and who afterwards secured for him three manuscripts together said to contain ‘the most genuine account which is extant of the origin of the Budhu religion, of its doctrines, of its introduction into Ceylon, and of the effects, moral and political, which those doctrines had produced upon the native government’.
²

Two of these texts were written in Sinhalese (today Sinhala) but the third – called by Johnston the
Mahavansi
, but more correctly the
Mahavamsa
, or ‘Great Dynastic Chronicle’ – was in the original Pali. When Sir Alexander Johnston retired from Ceylon in 1819 these gifts went with him.

This same period saw the arrival of the first Protestant missionaries on the island. They included the Reverend William Buckly Fox, a Wesleyan who made it his business to translate biblical tracts into the local tongues and to this end assembled a
Dictionary of the Ceylon-Portuguese, Singalese and English Languages
, published in 1819. When he returned to England in 1823 Fox was declared by Johnston to be ‘the best European Pali and Singhalese scholar at present in Europe’. But how he had acquired his knowledge of Pali – if indeed he could read Pali at all – is a mystery, since Pali was at that time as hermetic a language as Sanskrit had been in India before the Wilkins–Halhead breakthrough, although in this case it was the Sinhalese Buddhist
monks who refused to share its secrets. Nevertheless, it was Fox to whom Johnston turned when it was decided that his three Ceylonese texts should be published in English.

Fox’s purported translation of the
Great Dynastic Chronicle
was duly published in England in 1833 as the first volume of
The Mahavansi, the Raja-Ratnacari and the Raja-vali, forming the Sacred and Historical Books of Ceylon
. However, the only name to appear on the book’s title page was that of its publisher, Edward Upham, who had died the year before – and to further muddy the waters, the Reverend Fox himself died within months of the book’s appearance. For reasons that have never been explained, Fox’s translation attracted very little public notice in Britain. It may be that the project’s chief supporter, Sir Alexander Johnston, had begun to have doubts. Yet the fact remains that here was the first published English translation of that Lankan epic, the
Great Dynastic Chronicle –
albeit one made from what was almost certainly a Sinhalese translation of an imperfect copy of the original Pali.

Even more remarkably, this translation stated that in the very earliest days of the island’s history a strong connection had existed between a Lankan king, named by the chronicle’s translator as ‘Petissa the Second’, and an Indian monarch, ‘King Darmasoca of Jambu-dwipa [the Indian mainland]’. These two rulers had ‘lived in friendship, and loved each other’. They had exchanged gifts and letters, and the Indian king Darmasoca had written to Petissa to say that he kept the commandments of ‘Budhu’ and desired the king of Lanka to do the same. The consequences of this royal friendship had, it seems, been profound, for it was during the reign of these two monarchs that Buddhism had been established in Lanka, changing the entire course of that island’s history.

As a demonstration of the importance of this alliance, the compilers of the
Great Dynastic Chronicle
had devoted several chapters to the Indian monarchs who had ruled over Magadha from the time of Sakyamuni Buddha down to the reign of King Darmasoca. Indeed, the chronicle’s fifth chapter was entirely given over to an account of Darmasoca’s rule, beginning with an account of the rise to power of his grandfather Chandragupta with the help of the Brahman Chanakya very much as given in the Sanskrit verse-drama
The Minister’s Signet Ring translated
by Sir William Jones. It went on to describe how Chandragupta’s son Bindusara had appointed as his heir his eldest son, Prince Sumana, but that among King Bindusara’s other ninety-nine children was a son called Priyadase. According to Fox’s summary, this prince Priyadase had as a youth been sent away by his father to the city of Wettisa [Vidisha], where he ‘married the princess, called Wettisa, of the royal family called Sacca [Sakya] … and became king of the city Udeny [Ujjain]: he had one son and a daughter by this Queen Wettisa. As this king was very prosperous in every thing, he was styled Asoca Prince.’

This single passage established a clear link that no one at the time noticed, which was that King Bindusara’s eldest son by his second queen was named ‘Priyadase’ but later came to be known as ‘Asoca’. As told in Fox’s summary, this same Prince Priyadase/Asoca had gone on to sieze the throne of Magadha for himself following the death of his father. Whereupon his brother Prince Sumana ‘made war against the new king, called Asoca of Cusumepura, and Asoka was the conqueror. This conqueror became sovereign king over the whole Jambu-Dweepa.’

Five further chapters of the
Great Dynastic Chronicle
were devoted to the close relationship between King Petissa the
Second of Lanka and King Asoca of India, in his later years styled Darmasoca. In the last chapter King Asoca’s reign of forty-four years had been summarised in one succinct paragraph:

He had first conquered his enemies, and reigned four years without being crowned; and, after he was crowned, he had been succouring 60,000 impostors for three years; and on the fourth year that he was crowned, he was converted by the grand priest Niggroda, and embraced the religion of Budhu … and he had also commenced to build in the same year 84,000 temples, at the expense of ninety-six kelles in gold, which temples he completed within the time of three years. On the sixth year that he was crowned, he caused his son, the priest Mihindu, and his daughter Sangamittrah, to be created priest and priestess … On the seventeenth year, he caused to be compiled the law of Budhu, and had restored it to its original purity. On the eighteenth year that he was crowned, he had sent the bough of the holy tree to Ceylon. On the twelfth year after this, he solemnised the funeral ceremony of his Queen Asandimittrah by burning her corpse. On the fourth year after that, he was again married to a young queen, called Tissahraccah. On the third year of his second marriage, this Queen Tissahraccah, through malice, had pierced a prickle, called mandoe, in the holy tree, to kill it, after which he reigned but four years only.