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 inscriptions? How is society (excluding the state) organized? How much is Asoka trying to change how society is organized, if at all?
  • what happened to the fishermen and huntsmen no longer needed when animal killing prohibited?
  • How common was Asoka’s position of religious tolerance? How might we characterize his position? R12 seems to suggest that some partisans might want to “extoll one's own sect or disparage another's,” and (somewhat unconvincingly to me) tries to persuade that honor another man’s sect might in fact help your own. What were relations between the sects? Peaceful, as Asoka hopes, or more adversarial?
  • Similarly: where is Hinduism?
  • not obviously present in the list of sects in P7, except perhaps the “Brahman ascetics”
  • no known dedications of religious sites by Asoka, unlike his gifts to Buddhists (stupa, stone walls) and the Ajivikas (caves); contrast the Heliodorus inscription ~one century later.
  • Are any of us persuaded by Asoka to alter our own way of life?

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