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 Buddhist, as is clear from many of the minor rock edicts (one-off, unique inscription). He claims (Maski) to be a ‘lay disciple’ of the Buddha using the term upāsaka, which is apparently still the term for non-monastic followers of Buddhism. In the Bhabra rock edict he describes his “reverence for and faith in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Samgha (Buddhist religious orders”) and gives recommendations for specific Buddhist texts to listen to. He personally goes on pilgrimage to Rummindei to see the birthplace of the Buddha, and in the inexplicably omitted (p. 15 “omitted” – why?) Nigali Sagar edict he describes a visit to the birthplace of another Buddha, where he expanded the stupa.
• But it’s striking that none of the explicitly Buddhist material made it into the more widely distributed Major Rock Edicts and Pillar Edicts. R7 and R12 are especially at pains to stress Asoka’s evenhandedness with different faiths. He “wishes members of all faiths to live everywhere in his kingdom” (R7) and even encourages all faiths to respect one another: “through concord men may learn and respect the conception of Dharma accepted by others” (R12). Asoka assumes that all faiths have some conception of Dharma, but imagines differences between these conceptions that nevertheless should be appreciated.
• Despite this apparent even-handedness, it seems possible that Asoka and his governance might still be in some sense Buddhist. One might speculate that features of Asoka’s conception of Dharma lean toward a kind of lowest common denominator Buddhism (or perhaps a goal to reach for, as speculated last week). Possibilities:

• Perhaps the lengthy concern for animal suffering (laid out in detail in P5)?
• The passions (ferocity, cruelty, anger, arrogance, jealousy) lead to sin and hence to ruin (P3)
• It is more difficult for the rich to abandon sin than the poor (R10, cf. R3, though Maski) (~Matthew 19:24)
• Honoring mother and father
• Meditation as means of moral advancement (P7)

• Ultimately though I don’t know enough about early Buddhism and other contemporary religions in India to make an argument one way or another, and I think there’s a risk the logic would be circular: it looks like the edicts of Asoka are by far the earliest evidence for Buddhism, predating all other surviving texts by centuries.
• On a closing note, Asoka recommended Buddhist monks and laymen listen to specific Buddhist works. Per Schmithausen 1992, there is little agreement on matching these texts to the later extant Buddhist texts, but many think that the Muni-gāthā Asoka mentions is perhaps the surviving Muni Sutta, which (apparently famously) begins:
  From familiarity fear is born,

from household life arises dust;

no household, no familiar life—

such is the vision for the sage.

This kind of praise of the ‘solitary sage,’ an ascetic who rejects close relationships and household society, seems at odds with Asoka, who values social relations and is the opposite of an hermit. It’s hard for me still to understand Asoka – if he values the ascetic life so strongly, why not renounce his kingship and pursue it himself? He must think that his work as a moralizing king is in some way more worthwhile.

APPENDIX: What else do we know about Asoka and his empire outside the edicts?

For our final session I plan to reread the edicts (probably in Thapar’s translation) and to read Part III “The Mauryan empire and its aftermath” from The Archaeology of Early Historic South Asia (Cambridge University Press 1995). From what I’ve skimmed of that text it looks like the inscriptions of Asoka are one of the main bodies of evidence for the Mauryan empire. Other main sources include:

• the Arthasastra, a treatise on statecraft of disputed date, but potentially dating back at least in part to Asoka’s grandfather Candragupta Maurya
• fragments of the Indian History of Megasthenes, a Greek author who visited the court of Candragupta Maurya and wrote a four-book history of India. Substantial fragments survive in later Greek and Latin authors.
• other inscriptions. There are only ~5 inscriptions other than the edicts of Asoka that can be securely dated to the Mauryan period; most Indian inscriptions are later, but some contain references to Asoka.
• archaeological sources, e.g. stupas adjacent to Asokan pillars.

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