Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor (20 page)

‘Having put him to death,’ wrote Turnour in his translation –

Chanako installed in the sovereignty over the whole of Jambudipo [India], a descendant of the dynasty of Moriyan sovereigns, endowed with illustrious and beneficent attributes, named Chandragutto. He reigned thirty-four years. His son Bindusara reigned twenty-eight years. The sons of
Bindusara were one hundred and one, the issue of different mothers. Among them, Asoko [the Pali form of the Sanskrit Ashoka, rendered as Ashoka from here on to avoid confusion] by his piety and supernatural wisdom, became all-powerful. He having put to death one hundred brothers, minus one, born of different mothers, reigned sole sovereign of all Jambudipo. Be it known, that from the period of the death of Buddho, and antecedent to his installation, two hundred and eighteen years had elapsed.

In other words, Ashoka had been anointed king of Magadha 218 years after the death of Sakyamuni Buddha.

Turnour’s translation went on to give details of King Ashoka’s rise to power. Due to a rumour that he is destined to murder his father and take the throne for himself, Ashoka is sent away to govern the kingdom of Avanti, with its capital city at Ujjain. On his way there Ashoka halts at Vidisha and meets a ‘lovely maiden named Devi, the daughter of a merchant. He made her his wife, and she was (afterwards) with child by him and bore in Ujjeni a beautiful boy, Mahindo [Mahinda in Sanskrit, and in that form hereafter], and when two years had passed she bore a daughter, Samghamitta [Sanghamitta in Sanskrit, and in that form hereafter].’
³⁰

A decade later, while acting as his father’s viceroy in Ujjain, Ashoka receives news that King Bindusara is dying. He hastens to Pataliputra and immediately on arrival presents himself at his father’s deathbed: ‘As soon as his sire expired, seizing the capital for himself, and putting to death his eldest brother in that celebrated city, he usurped the sovereignty.’
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Four years pass before Ashoka’s position as ruler of Magadha is strong enough to allow his official anointing as king to take
place. He appoints his younger brother Tisso (Tissa in Sanskrit, and in that form hereafter), born of the same mother, as his deputy. However, Ashoka’s violent conduct earns him the epithet
Candasoka
or ‘Angry Ashoka’. He then begins to have religious doubts. His father King Bindusara had been ‘of the Brahmanical faith’ and had supported sixty thousand Brahmans with alms, a practice which Ashoka follows for three years until the ‘despicable’ behaviour of the Brahmans at court leads him to order representatives from all religions to come before him separately so that he can question them about their tenets. While this examination is in progress his eye is caught by the calm bearing of a young Buddhist monk passing under his window. The boy’s name is Nigrodha, and he turns out to be the orphaned son of Ashoka’s eldest half-brother Sumana, whom Ashoka killed in his rise to power. Sitting Nigrodha on his throne, Ashoka questions him on matters of Buddhist doctrine until he is satisfied that this is the true faith – ‘and when the lord of the earth had heard him he was won to the doctrine of the Conqueror [i.e. Sakyamuni Buddha]’.
³²

Ashoka now becomes an
upasaka
or ‘lay Buddhist’, the Brahmans are expelled from court and sixty thousand Buddhist monks take their place. The leading elder of the age, Moggaliputta Tissa (Tissa son of Moggali), becomes King Ashoka’s teacher and remains the dominant figure in Ashoka’s life until his death in the twenty-sixth year of Ashoka’s reign.

Having learned that there are eighty-four thousand discourses on the tenets of Buddhism, King Ashoka orders stupas and monastic institutions to be built in eighty-four thousand places. Outside his capital of Pataliputra he builds the Ashokarama, a major monastic complex bearing his name. The building of these monasteries takes three years and to celebrate their
completion Ashoka holds a great festival, bestowing lavish gifts upon the Buddhist Church. On the day of the festival itself he proceeds in state to visit his Ashokarama and is proclaimed Dhammasoko – in Sanskrit
Dharmashoka
, or ‘Ashoka of the Moral Law’:

On that day the great king wearing all his adornments with the women of his household, with his ministers and surrounded by the multitude of his troops, went to his own arama, as if cleaving the earth. In the midst of the brotherhood he stood, bowing down to the venerable brotherhood. In the assembly were eighty kotis [millions] of bhikkhus [monks], and … ninety times one hundred thousand bhikkhunis [nuns] … These monks and nuns wrought the miracle called the ‘unveiling of the world’ to the end that the king Dharmashoka might be converted. Candashoka was he called in earlier times, by reason of his evil deeds; he was known as Dharmashoka afterwards because of his pious deeds.
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The elder Moggaliputta Tissa acknowledges the king’s great generosity towards the Buddhist Sangha but explains that a greater means of gaining merit would be to allow his two children Mahinda and Sanghamitta to enter the Buddhist order. Mahinda is then aged twenty and his sister eighteen. Their ordination takes places in King Dharmashoka’s sixth year following his consecration. Dharmashoka’s younger brother Tissa then seeks permission to become a monk, which is reluctantly given.

The fortunes of the Buddhists now improve greatly, thanks to the generosity of Dharmashoka. But this success attracts
‘heretics’ who bring their own false doctrines, leading to great confusion within the Buddhist community and causing Moggaliputta Tissa to describe them as a ‘dreadful excrescence on religion, like unto a boil’. These schisms continue for seven years and eventually force the king to act. However, his teacher had gone into a seven-year solitary retreat in the Himalaya, so King Dharmashoka sends one of his ministers to the Ashokarama with orders to settle a particular dispute, resulting in an incident in which a number of monks are killed.

Greatly distressed, King Dharmashoka sends for Moggaliputta Tissa, who finally breaks his retreat when the king despatches a ship up the Ganges to collect him. Ashoka then summons the whole of the Buddhist priesthood to assemble for a special convocation beside the Ashokarama. Each monk expounds the doctrines according to his school, after which sixty thousand are expelled as heretics. Under the direction of Moggaliputta Tissa the remaining Buddhists succeed in making ‘a true compilation of the true dharma’.
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This important event – afterwards known as the Third Buddhist Council – lasts nine months and ends in the seventeenth year of Dharmashoka’s reign.

Meanwhile, in ‘the celebrated capital Anuradhapura, in the delightful Lanka’, the Lankan king Mutasiwo has died after a reign of sixty years. His second son becomes king and takes the name
Dewananpiatisso
or ‘Tisso Beloved-of-the-Gods’ (Devanamapiyatissa in Sanskrit, and in that form hereafter). He decides that no one is more worthy to receive a gift of such jewels than his friend King Dharmashoka. To escort the jewels he sends his nephew Maha Aritto, who journeys for seven days by sea and then another seven days by land to reach Pataliputra and present the gifts to King Dharmashoka. The Magadhan
king responds with gifts of his own that include sacred water from the Ganges, ‘a royal virgin of great personal charms’ and ‘one hundred and sixty loads of hill paddy [rice] which had been brought by parrots’.

Along with these material presents Dharmashoka sends the gift of ‘pious advice’ in the form of the following words: ‘I have taken refuge in Buddho, his religion, and his priesthood: I have avowed myself a devotee in the religion of the descendant of Sakyo. Ruler of men, imbuing thy mind with the conviction of the truth of these supreme blessings, with unfeigned faith, do thou also take refuge in this salvation.’

This first religious contact between the two monarchs is followed by a far more ambitious missionary project, attributed in the
Great Dynastic Chronicle
not to Ashoka but to his religious teacher Moggaliputta Tissa, who sends missionaries to every corner of the Indian subcontinent and beyond. This includes a deputation of five elders, led by King Dharmashoka’s son Mahinda, who are despatched south with the instruction, ‘Establish ye in the delightful land of Lanka, the delightful religion of the Vanquisher [i.e. Sakyamuni Buddha].’

Understandably, the
Great Dynastic Chronicle
devotes a great deal of space to Mahinda’s mission to Lanka, which takes place when Mahinda has been a monk for twelve years. Before he leaves for Lanka, Mahinda goes to Vidisha to say goodbye to his mother, his party now including his sister Sanghamitta’s son, Sumano. His mother Devi is described as living in a monastery at Chetiyagiri, or ‘the Hill of the Stupa’, and being overjoyed at seeing her beloved son.

After a month at his mother’s monastery on the Hill of the Stupa, Mahinda and his party depart for Lanka – not by land and sea but by air, alighting on a mountain peak in the centre
of the island. King Devanamapiyatissa of Lanka receives the missionaries at Mihintale and is converted to Buddhism, along with his family and his court. Several chapters later Sumano is asked to return to Pataliputra to beg his great-uncle King Dharmashoka for relics of the Buddha. Sumano returns to Magadha to find Dharmashoka engaged in worshipping the Bodhi tree at Bodhgaya. Having received the Buddha’s alms bowl from him, Sumano proceeds to the Himalayas to collect two further Buddha relics: a collarbone and an eye-tooth. These precious relics are transported to Lanka and interred by King Devanamapiyatissa in a great stupa built for that purpose at Anuradhapura.

King Devanamapiyatissa’s next request is for a cutting from the sacred Bodhi tree, which is communicated to Dharmashoka by his daughter Sanghamitta, now a female elder of the new Buddhist Church in Lanka. The king is greatly troubled as to how this can be done without harming the tree but performs a complex ceremony that ends with his taking a cutting from the Bo tree, potting it and placing it on board a sea-going vessel under Sanghamitta’s care. The boat then sails down the Ganges to the sea while the king and his army march across the land for seven days before meeting up with the boat at the port of Tamalitta (Tamralipti in modern Bengal). Here a final ceremony is held before the king wades into the sea up to his neck to place the cutting on board and bid it farewell: ‘The maharaja having thus spoken, stood on the shore of the ocean with uplifted hands; and, gazing on the departing bo-branch, shed tears in the bitterness of his grief. In the agony of parting with the bo-branch, the disconsolate Dharmashoka, weeping and lamenting in loud sobs, departed for his own capital.’
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After planting the Bodhi-tree cutting in his pleasure garden at
Anuradhapura the king of Lanka follows his neighbour’s example by establishing stupas and monasteries throughout his island. ‘Thus this ruler of Lanka, Dewanamapiyatissa [
sic
]
,’
declares the
Great Dynastic Chronicle
, ‘for the spiritual benefit of the people of Lanka, executed these undertakings in the first year of his reign; and delighting in the exercise of his benevolence, during the whole of his life, realised for himself manifold blessings.’ He reigns for forty years, his death being followed eight years later by that of Dharmashoka’s son Mahinda, ‘the light of Lanka’.

From this point onwards the
Great Dynastic Chronicle
has little more to say about events on the Indian mainland – except for one ambiguous paragraph at the start of its twentieth chapter, which tells how in the thirtieth year of King Ashoka’s reign his Buddhist queen Asandhimitra dies, and how four years later he remarries:

Dharmashoka, under the influence of carnal passions, raised to the dignity of queen consort, an attendant of his former wife. In the third year from that date, this malicious and vain creature, who thought but of the charms of her own person, saying ‘this king, neglecting me, lavishes his devotion exclusively on the bo-tree’ – in her rage attempted to destroy the great bo with the poisoned fang of a toad. In the fourth year from that occurrence [i.e. after the death of Queen Asandhimitra, thus thirty-seven years after Ashoka’s anointing], this highly gifted monarch Dharmashoka fulfilled the lot of mortality.

This summary hints that all was not well in King Ashoka’s royal household in the last years of his life. Thirty years after his anointing his beloved Buddhist queen dies. Four years later he
takes one of his late wife’s attendants as his new queen, who becomes so jealous of her husband’s devotion to Buddhism that in the thirty-seventh year after his consecration she seeks to destroy the Bodhi tree. Ashoka dies soon afterwards, but he is accorded none of the laudatory remarks that the
Great Dynastic Chronicle
gives his son or his daughter at their deaths. The disappointment is almost palpable. King Devanama-piyatissa’s great ally and model sets Buddhism in motion in Lanka, but then at the very end of his life lets himself and the Buddhist cause down.

With Dharmashoka’s death the
Great Dynastic Chronicle
loses all interest in the affairs of the mainland. In fact, India as Jambudwipa features only once more, when a later Lankan monarch builds a new relic stupa at Anuradhapura and invites Buddhist monks from all over India and beyond to attend its inauguration. According to the
Great Dynastic Chronicle
, many thousands of monks attend from Rajgir, Isipatana, the Jetavana monastery at Sravasti, the Mahavana monastery at Vaishali, Kosambi, the Ashokarama at Pataliputra, Kashmir, Pallavabhogga, ‘Alasanda [Alexandria] the city of the Yonas [probably modern Kandahar]’, the ‘Vinjha forest mountains’, the Bodhimanda monastery, the ‘Vanavasa country’, and the ‘great Kelasa vihara’.
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It seems that a century after the death of King Dharmashoka Buddhism was flourishing mightily both in Lanka and on the Indian mainland.

George Turnour’s
Epitome of the History of Ceylon, Compiled from Native Annals: and the First Twenty Chapters of the Mahawanso
showed beyond all reasonable doubt that King Ashoka was not merely the instrument for the establishment of Buddhism in Lanka but a major figure in Indian history in his own right, whose sovereign authority extended throughout the
subcontinent and whose influence as a propagator of Buddhism extended beyond its borders. And for those who cared to look, it provided an important clue as to why the complex of stupas at Sanchi might have some special significance in the Ashoka story. The
Great Dynastic Chronicle
had described how the Prince Ashoka’s first wife Devi, whom he had first met at Vidisha, afterwards lived in Chetiyagiri, ‘the Hill of the Stupa’, so named because of ‘the superb Chetiya
wiharo
[monastic complex] which had been erected by herself’. It was from here that their eldest son Mahinda had set out with his fellow missionaries to take the Buddhist teachings to Lanka. There are several hills in close proximity to the town of Vidisha but the nearest is the hill today known as Sanchi. Here, it seems, lay the explanation as to why that particular Buddhist site might have become the object of special attention both during and after Ashoka’s lifetime.