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Edicts of Ashoka: Session 4

What will I take away from our reading of Asoka? Asoka’s distinctive voice and his apparently earnest desire to help his people “It is hard to do good and he who does good, does a difficult thing. And I have done much good.” (R5) a surprising mix of imperial boasting and humility, asserting rather than arguing. though Asoka sees himself as attempting to persuade (P7) v. different from e.g. Res Gestae, where Augustus’s personality does not come through Real links to the Mediterranean (Greeks, written in Greek, forgive your enemies), and simultaneously very Indian (meditation, dharma, rejection of passions) The paucity of early, securely dateable sources in Indian history and literature. The physical reality of the edicts (carved in caves, on pillars, on immense rocks with elephant sculptures) What questions do I want to consider in our final meeting? What is Asoka’s personality, as it emerges from the inscriptions? What do we learn about Indian society and culture from Asoka’s inscripti...
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Edicts of Ashoka: Session 3

I cheated a bit this week and did some googling to try to understand 3rd century BCE Buddhism and how Asoka fits into it. This response reflects that cheating. In some sense Asoka’s desire that “the people, at present and in the future, hear of his practice of Dharma” (R10) came true. Far from being forgotten, Asoka was remembered in later Buddhist tradition as a great missionary Buddhist king who spread Buddhism throughout his empire and beyond; the earliest surviving histories of Sri Lanka, the Dipavamsa  and the Mahavamsa  (4th-5th c. CE), remember his son Mahinda as a missionary who converted Sri Lanka’s king to Buddhism (great images on Mahinda’s Wikipedia page ), and the Divyavadana (perhaps 2nd c. CE) contains a lengthy account of the life of Asoka as a Buddhist king (translated as The Legend of King Asoka   by John S. Strong (Princeton 1983)). How much of this Asoka do we see in his edicts? And what kind of Buddhism does he seem interested in? First, Asoka is definitely a Buddh...
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Edicts of Ashoka: Session 2

How does Asoka imagine the relationship between the people and Asoka? Here are some thoughts on how Asoka imagines the relationship between himself and the people: Asoka attempts to have a direct and to some degree personal relationship with all the people of the empire, of any class, religious sect, and location (P6). The king himself: The king himself travels throughout his empire and meets with all kinds of people (naming priests/ascetics, aged, and rural people in R8). The king through intermediaries: He maintains a state apparatus, with a harem, officials, provincial governors, “dharma-spreaders” (P5), and lower ranks, but these people are apparently imagined as primarily intermediaries for Asoka that allow him to reach more people, not as independent agents with their own wills: undifferentiated and personality-less officials act in accordance with Asoka’s precepts (P1) and handle the distribution of gifts from Asoka (P7) and whenever there is a dispute about one of Asoka’s order...
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Edicts of Ashoka: Session 1

The Edicts of Asoka are a series of 3rd century BCE inscriptions from the Indian subcontinent. The “major rock edicts,” some of which we are reading for this week, survive in ten locations with similar (near identical?) texts. Most are written in Prakit, a descendant of Sanskrit, but there is one monolingual Greek inscription and one bilingual Greek-Aramaic inscription from Kandahar, in modern Afghanistan. The content of the inscriptions primarily concern “King Priyadarsi,” his interest in “Dharma,” and his efforts to “increase the practice of Dharma.” To my layman’s eyes, they pose a number of immediate questions (not all answerable by this group or at all) Who was the audience of these inscriptions?  Why were they carved in the locations where they were carved, and under what conditions would the original audience(s) interact with them? Are these inscriptions genuinely intended for Asoka’s descendants (13 and 4)? Are they intended for ascetics? Ordinary people (apparently the audienc...
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Turner: Romance and Reality (Yale 2025)

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 Google photo album:  https://photos.app.goo.gl/gZp8gVA4BiiV7tWx7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._M._W._Turner https://britishart.yale.edu/exhibitions-programs/j-m-w-turner-romance-and-reality  ( archive ) Some bare minimum thoughts: Earlier than I thought. I thought Turner was late 19th century, but he is earlier (1775-1851). A true Romantic. And similarly, he is more romantic than I thought, at least early on. Like other Romantic artists he's interested in sublimity and power of nature (e.g. Vesuvius), and like Caspar David Friedrich he is interested in Gothic ruins in a nocturnal landscape. cf. e.g. this Vesuvius by Dahl, Friedrich's friend. https://sammlung.staedelmuseum.de/en/work/the-eruption-of-vesuvius-in-december-1820 The Yale exhibit convincingly argues that Turner engaged in direct competition with his predecessors, especially the Dutch landscape artist Aelbert Cuyp (the Maas at Dordrecht ) and Claude Lorraine.
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Dura-Europos

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Google photos album: https://photos.app.goo.gl/fzTwjXCuCv31dVhr7 The objects in this gallery are from Dura-Europos, a peripheral garrison fort/city in what is now eastern Syria. After a intense period of Roman construction and occupation starting c. 150 CE, the Persians sacked the city in 253 CE and the city was abandoned. As a consequence, the city was well-preserved, especially the frescos of the synagogue (once in Damascus and still now, we hope). Yale participated in the excavations in the 1930s and brought many objects back to New Haven, including the Christian frescos. Initial interest in the site was sparked by “a monograph seductively called Oriental Forerunners of Byzantine Painting ,” ( link ). By contrast to such works, recent scholarly opinion has turned against a) stylistic interpretations of art and b) narratives of decline in late antiquity (e.g. Elsner 2018: 16-7). Overall, though, what I find most striking about this art is a) how different it is from standard contempo...
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What do I like and dislike about the Odyssey? (Catherine Project 11)

 Catherine Project, Spring 2024, Homer -- Od. 21-24 For my final reflection I hope you’ll indulge this pretty narcissistic question that may very well say more about me than it does about the text we’re reading together. Plus, I’ve already voiced many of these thoughts in our earlier conversations. But to put them down in one place, some dislikes: The Odyssey divides up the human world into good guys and bad guys (the divine world is more complicated, I think, like Calypso, Circe, and Athena), and many of the most powerful emotional scenes arise from good things happening to the good guys and bad things happening to the bad guys: like the Telemachus & Odysseus reunion (15), or the slaughter of the suitors (22). I especially dislike the righteous anger and joy I feel over the death of the suitors (the “yeah die die kill kill” inside of me). Feels like the Odyssey is appealing to a particularly nasty and brutish part of me that delights in anger and revenge. The Iliad’s most powe...
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