Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor (32 page)

(Above) One of the panels on a pillar of the West Gateway of the Great Tope at Sanchi. It shows the Bodhi tree unfenced and in its simplest form, surrounded by worshippers headed by an unusually rotund man. (Opposite) Musicians and worshippers clad in decidedly un-Indian dress worship a newly built stupa, from a side panel from the North Gateway. (Maisey,
Sanchi and its Remains,
1892)

This last image did catch Cunningham’s attention. It shows the worshippers clad in short skirts and cloaks, with pointed caps or bands round their heads and wearing sandals laced up to the knee. One of the musicians plays a double flute, another a harp-like instrument. Both the musical instruments and the dress are more Greek than Indian. Everything points to this being the portrayal of the dedication of a stupa in the Taxila or Gandhara region.

From the Great Tope the excavators moved on to its surrounds.
In front of each of the four gateways they found shrines containing Buddha statues, and immediately beside the South Gateway the broken remains of a column of a light-coloured sandstone, displaying that high polish that characterised the stone columns Cunningham had seen in Delhi and Allahabad. It bore an inscription in eight lines of Brahmi, the upper part of which was damaged. ‘The opening is nearly obliterated,’ wrote Cunningham –

I think it probable that the first word was
Devanam;
next comes a blank and then
Maga;
and it is possible that the whole line might be read –

Devanam (piya) Magadha raja

‘Devanampriya, King of Magadha.’

The second line may be partially restored, thus –

(a)bhi(vadema)nam chetiyagiri

‘with salutation to the fraternity of Chaityagiri.’

At the end of the third line the word
sangham
or ‘Buddhist community’ was distinctly visible, as were the words
‘bhikhu cha bhikhuni’,
‘monks or nuns’. The concluding line of the inscription was also perfectly legible, reading: ‘It is my wish that the Sangha community may always be united.’

This was the first of Ashoka’s so-called Schism Edicts to be discovered, in which the emperor urged the Buddhist community to avoid dissension and remain united. If Ashoka had caused such an inscription to be erected here it was logical to suppose that similar edict pillars would be found at other major Buddhist sites. To date, only three such Schism Edict pillars have been found: at Sanchi, Sarnath and Kausambi, but there must originally have been many more.

Cunningham worked out that the original height of the
inscribed shaft must have been 31 feet 11 inches. His measurements also demonstrated that the column had been shaped so as to give ‘a gentle swell in the middle of the shaft’, showing that whoever had cut the pillar had followed the same practice as the Greeks, who perfected this technique. The pillar bore a number of deep cuts where unsuccessful efforts had been made to saw through the shaft, presumably so that those segments could be put to use as rollers.

Further sorting through the mass of stonework covering the site brought to light the bell, abacus and capital that had once crowned the Ashokan pillar. To the delight of the excavators the capital was in the form of four lions ‘standing back to back, each four feet in height’. Their heads had been knocked off

but their bodies and limbs were still intact, ‘so boldly sculpted, and the muscles and claws so accuracy placed, that they might well be placed in comparison with many specimens of Grecian art’. Equally well sculpted was the decoration on the circular abacus on which the four lions stood, with ‘some very Grecian-looking foliage, and with four pairs of
chakwas,
or holy Brahmani geese. These birds are always seen in pairs, and are celebrated among the Hindus for their conjugal affection. They are therefore presented billing, with outstretched necks, and heads lowered towards the ground.’

Fred Maisey’s drawing of the damaged Ashokan lion capital at Sanchi. (Maisey,
Sanchi and its Remains,
1892)

This abacus was strikingly similar to that supporting the capital of the pillar at Lauriya-Nandangarh in North Bihar, except that here at Sanchi the ducks came in pairs rather than in an extended line.

A second pillar similar in height and shape to the first was found close to the North Gateway, with a capital topped not by lions but a larger than life-size human figure. ‘The expression of the face is placid, but cheerful,’ wrote Cunningham, ‘that places it amongst the finest specimens of Indian sculpture. It probably represents Asoka himself.’ However, this was wishful thinking; the statue actually dates from the Gupta era.

Cunningham judged the Great Tope and its surrounds to have been built in three phases – the stupa pre-dating Ashoka, the railings and stone columns being Ashokan, and the four gateways post-Ashokan. He was right only in so far as there were three phases. The brick core of the stupa, the edict pillar and its lion capital are indeed Ashokan, but at the close of the Mauryan period the site had been badly damaged, the most likely culprit being the Brahman Pushyamitra, founder of the Shunga dynasty. One or more of Pushyamitra’s successors had then restored and enlarged the stupa, adding stonework and the
surrounding balustrade. The four gateways had gone up in the third phase, beginning with the South Gateway, which identifies itself as erected during the reign of the Satavahana king Satakarni – but which Satakarni? Although carved in stone, this and the other three gateways clearly drew on wooden prototypes that may well have preceded them here and at other sites. They mark the moment of transition from building in wood to building in stone. But Cunningham could well have been right in linking them to the empire-building Satakarni I, who ruled for some fifty years before his death in about 125
BCE.
If that dating is correct – and there are plenty of scholars who argue that it is too early by a century – then the older stonemasons mong those who worked on the relief carvings would easily have been born in the same century as the great emperor Ashoka.

From the Great Tope Cunningham and Maisey moved on to open another twenty-seven stupas, ten of them on Sanchi hill and the remainder at four Buddhist sites in the surrounding hills. Every excavation led to the discovery of relic boxes containing one or more soapstone reliquaries, each holding ashes and bone fragments, and each inscribed in Brahmi with the name of the Buddhist saint or saints whose remains it contained, in some cases with added background information – such as, for example, ‘Relics of the emancipated Kasyapa Gotra the missionary to the whole Hemawanta [Himalayas]’. To the amazement of the excavators, many of these names matched those of early Buddhist elders and missionaries as given in the
Great Dynastic Chronicle.
In what Cunningham had designated ‘No. 2 Tope’ at Sanchi were found five reliquaries, which together held the remains of ‘no less than ten men of the Buddhist Church, during the reign of Ashoka. One of them
[Moggaliputta Tissa] conducted the proceedings of the Third Synod, in 241 B.C., and two were deputed to the Hemawanta country as missionaries, after the meeting of the Synod. From this we may conclude that the date of the Tope cannot be earlier than about 220 B.C., by which time the last of Ashoka’s contemporaries would have passed away.’

The relics from ‘No. 3 Tope’ at Sanchi proved to be equally revealing. They were found to contain the ashes of two even more famous early Buddhists: Sariputra and Mogalana, two of Sakyamuni Buddha’s earliest converts and among the closest of his disciples. Further remains of these same two elders were buried in other stupas, showing that the practice of spreading relics had been widespread at the time of Ashoka. ‘These discoveries’, wrote Cunningham with absolute justification, ‘appear to me to be of the greatest importance for the early illustration of the early history of India, for they authenticate in the fullest manner the narrative of the most interesting portions of Ashoka’s reign.’
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More specifically, they corroborated the claims made in Ceylon’s
Great Dynastic Chronicle.

Cunningham concluded that Sanchi and the Bhilsa region (today Vidisha) made up the place identified in the
Great Dynastic Chronicle
as Chetiyagiri, the ‘stupa hill’, where Ashoka’s first wife Devi had come from and where his first two children, Mahinda and Sanghamitta, grew up. That same Devi had either founded or patronised a monastery there and, even though the Great Tope’s colonnade and gateways were the work of Ashoka’s successors, this site was of particular interest to Ashoka as the starting point of the great missionary programme he had initiated as part of his drive to spread the Dharma throughout Jambudwipa and beyond.

Needless to say, Cunningham’s first report on Sanchi was immediately challenged by Professor Horace Wilson, still occupying the Boden Chair of Sanskrit at Oxford and still refusing to accept that the author of the Rock and Pillar Edicts was Ashoka. Cunningham responded by writing
The Bhilsa Topes,
copiously illustrated with Maisey’s maps and drawings, which became the model for all subsequent archaeological reports published in British India. He demolished Wilson’s arguments point by point, making no secret of his contempt for Wilson’s reliance on ‘mendacious’ Brahmanical testaments. Here, by contrast, was hard archaeological evidence that provided ‘the most complete and convincing proof of the authenticity of the history of Asoka, as related in the
Mahawanso’.
The publication of
The Bhilsa Topes
in 1853 effectively silenced Wilson, finally putting an end to the arguments over the identity of Piyadasi and the significance of Ashoka as the champion and propagator of Buddhism in the third century
BCE.

Dr Wilson had dominated the Orientalist scene since the 1820s, but not always to its advantage. With his death in 1860 a millstone fell from the neck of Indian studies, even if Wilson’s influence continued to linger at Oxford, where the scholar best qualified to succeed him to the Boden Chair, Wilson’s young German rival Max Müller, was notoriously passed over in favour of Wilson’s former student Monier Williams.

Cunningham believed his discoveries at Sanchi and the Bhilsa region to be equal in importance to those recently made in Mesopotamia by Henry Layard, whose impressive folio volume of
Illustrations of the Monuments of Nineveh
had appeared a few years earlier. But outside India few academics shared his enthusiasm and the British public showed no interest
whatsoever. They could respond to the romance of Ancient Egypt, thanks to the army of savants who had accompanied Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, the decipherment of the Rosetta Stone by Jean François Champollion in 1822 and the rich plunder from its tombs and pyramids that now filled their museums. They could even identify with Nineveh, Nimrod and Babylon through the Old Testament and the Holy Land. But India was something else. John Company now reigned supreme, imposing British values over a land formerly ‘cursed from one end to the other by the vice, the ignorance, the oppression, the despotism, the barbarous and cruel customs that have been the growth of ages under every description of Asiatic misrule’.
¹⁴
As far as the British public was concerned India had little to offer and never had, a land of picturesque mosques and tumbledown Muslim tombs as portrayed in the prints of the Daniells. Small wonder that a hitherto unheard-of emperor in a far distant past excited little interest. A century and a half later, the situation remains pretty much the same.