Weekday Greek

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...

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...

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...

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...