Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor (26 page)

I will twice perform the highest honours;

I will bathe the Bodhi tree

with jars full of fragrant waters,

and I will undertake to honour the sangha

with a great quinquennial festival.

Ashoka then orders a great quinquennial (held every five years) festival to be held outside Pataliputra, attended by monks from every corner of the land and from beyond the Himalayas. He honours the monks gathered there and deputes an elder to preach the true religion throughout his empire

The last section of the
Legend of King Ashoka
is taken up with tales of the emperor’s decline and death. It begins with the story of the birth of Ashoka’s son Dharmavivardhana by his queen Padmavati. Ashoka is overwhelmed by the beauty of the boy’s eyes and on hearing them compared to a Himalayan bird
called the
kunala
he renames the boy Kunala. A Buddhist elder foresees that Kunala will lose his eyesight and teaches him about the impermanence of all things. Ashoka’s chief queen Tishyarakshita then falls in love with Kunala’s eyes. When he rejects her advances and calls her ‘mother’, Tishyarakshita plots his destruction.

History now seems to repeat itself as Taxila once more rises in revolt against the king. Prince Kunala is sent to deal with the rebellion, and is warmly received by the people of Taxila, who explain that their quarrel is with the king and his arrogant ministers. Ashoka then falls dangerously ill in Pataliputra, with ‘an impure substance’ oozing from his pores. He sends for Kunala to return to Pataliputra to take over the kingdom, but Queen Tishyarakshita fears that after her indiscretion Kunala will order her killed if he succeeds to the throne. She therefore sets out to find a cure for Ashoka’s illness by making enquiries to see if anyone is suffering in the same way as the king. One such victim is found and brought to the queen, who kills him, cuts open his belly and discovers a large worm. She experiments with a succession of remedies, none of which kills the worm until she tries an onion – a vegetable regarded as unclean and therefore avoided by Brahmans and Kshatriyas. She doses the king with onion and cures him, and as a reward asks to be allowed to rule the country for a week. She then takes her revenge on Kunala by sending a message to Taxila in the king’s name ordering him to be blinded.

Knowing his fate is preordained, Kunala submits and is blinded. He and his wife then take to the road as beggar musicians. They make their way back to Pataliputra where Ashoka hears Kunala singing outside the walls of his palace and sends for him. He recognises his son and falls to the ground weeping.
He hears Kunala’s story and ‘burning with the fire of anger’ orders Tishyarakshita to be tortured to death. However, Kunala begs for the queen to be forgiven and because he has only compassion for his wicked stepmother his eyesight is restored. His father heeds his call for forgiveness – but still has Tishyarakshita burned to death.

After these events Ashoka teaches his younger brother Vitashoka the nature of suffering and, with the help of the elder Yashah, Vitashoka is ordained as a Buddhist monk. Initially, Vitashoka enters the Cock monastery outside Pataliputra but after finding this too noisy he retreats to the Himalayas. In the meantime, an enemy of Buddhism has circulated a painting of himself with the Buddha lying at his feet, which so angers Ashoka that he puts a price on the man’s head. A cowherd then catches sight of Vitashoka, who has allowed his hair and beard to grow, and mistakes him for the blasphemer. The cowherd kills him and brings his head to the king to claim the reward, whereupon Ashoka recognises his younger brother and is deeply grieved. Upagupta explains that the death of his brother is a consequence of Ashoka’s cruelty.

According to the
Legend of King Ashoka
, the great emperor’s last days are not happy ones. As he becomes increasingly ill and infirm, Ashoka becomes obsessed with giving donations to the Buddhist Church, to the point where the state treasury is in danger of being emptied. Prince Kunala’s son Sampadi has been appointed heir-apparent and on the advice of his counsellors he prohibits the state treasurer from disbursing any more state funds. Emperor Ashoka then starts donating his own personal tableware: first his gold dishes, then his silver plates and finally his copper plates, until his food is being served on
plates of rough earthenware. He is finally left with nothing of his own but half a
myrobalan
, or cherry plum fruit. This he presents to the Cock monastery as his last gift, with the words:

He who previously ruled the earth

Over which he spread his umbrella of sovereignty

And warmed the world like the noonday sun at its zenith –

Today that king has seen his fortunes cut off.

Deceived by his own karmic acts, he finds his glory gone

like the setting sun at dusk.

The dying Ashoka has the cherry plum fruit mashed and put into a soup for distribution to the community of monks at the Cock monastery. He asks his minister Radhagupta who is lord of the earth and is assured that he is. He then struggles to his feet, turns to each point of the compass and with a gesture of offering declares that he is presenting the whole earth ‘to the community of the Blessed One’s disciples’. He has these words written on a document that he seals with his teeth – and then dies. With what remains in the state treasury the ministers buy back the late king’s dominions from the Buddhist Sangha and Ashoka’s grandson Sampadi is consecrated as king.

But this is not quite the end of Ashoka’s story as told in the
Ashokavadana
, for a brief epilogue is attached. It begins: ‘Sampadi’s son was Brhaspati who, in turn, had a son named Vrsasena and Vrsasena had a son named Pushyadharman, and Pushyadharman begot Pushyamitra.’ It goes on to relate how King Pushyamitra, wishing his name to be as renowned as that of Ashoka, asks his Brahman priest how he can accomplish this. He is told that there are two ways: one is to do what King Ashoka did and build eighty-four thousand stupas; and the
other is to destroy all those same stupas. Pushyamitra decides to follow the latter course and advances with his army on the Cock monastery established by Ashoka outside Pataliputra, where he tells the monks to choose between saving themselves or the monastery. The monks offer to sacrifice themselves but Pushyamitra destroys both the monks and the monastery. He then embarks on a campaign against all Buddhist institutions, offering a reward for the head of every monk brought to him, until finally confronted by a
yaksha
guardian deity who flattens him under a mountain. ‘With the death of Pushyamitra,’ declares the last line of the
Legend of King Ashoka
, ‘the Mauryan lineage came to an end.’

The
Legend of King Ashoka
contains some obvious errors, such as its description of Bindusara as the son of Nanda and the Brahman regicide Pushyamitra as the last of the Mauryas. Its list of names of the Mauryan kings is also seriously at odds with those given in the
Vishnu, Matsya, Vayu
and
Brahmananda Puranas
(see chart,
p. 36
). However, when this list of Mauryan kings provided by
the Legend of King Ashoka
is set alongside the other lists in the
Puranas
, one thing is very clear: the confusion of Mauryan rulers’ names after the death of Ashoka. It points to an empire already falling apart in the great monarch’s last years, and then at his death breaking up into two or more warring regions as various claimants fought for supremacy, very much as the Successors had done after the death of Alexander.

Even as Burnouf was completing his work on the history of Buddhism, rumours came from Russia of more previous unknown documents on early Indian Buddhism. They emanated from the Department of Mongolian Language at the University
of Kazan on the Volga River, where the students were using a handwritten text translated from the original Tibetan. In 1840 one of those students, Vasili Vasiliev, joined the Russian Orthodox Church Mission in Peking (Beijing), and procured a copy of this same text in the original, printed by woodblock and entitled
Gya-gar Chos-byung
, or
The History of Buddhism in India
, the work of a Tibetan Lama named Taranatha.
⁵

Taranatha’s
History of Buddhism in India
devotes three of its forty-four chapters to King Ashoka, so adding another twist to the story. Although written as recently as 1608, it had drawn on older sources that included the
Divine Stories
but also two works now lost.
⁶
These lost sources told the story of Ashoka from a perspective best described as north-eastern, in that it allied itself with the Northern school but promoted the role of the early Buddhist Church in northern Magadha. In this version the great Buddhist instructor who teaches and advises King Ashoka is not Upagupta, the leading apostle of Mathura, as given in the
Legend of King Ashoka
, but Yashah, abbot of King Ashoka’s Cock monastery outside Pataliputra – which also features in the
Great Dynastic Chronicle
as the Ashokarama.

Taranatha’s
History
has been dismissed by scholars as too garbled to have any credence, but it contains elements that deserve to be considered when reconstructing Ashoka and his time. It describes Ashoka as the son of Nemita, king of Champaran in north Magadha, by a merchant’s daughter. Unlike his elder brothers who live in luxury, Prince Ashoka lives simply and sits on the ground to eat. When the mountain people of Kashmir and Nepal revolt he is sent to deal with them and is rewarded by his father by being made governor of Pataliputra. When King Nemita dies his ministers install Ashoka as ruler of Pataliputra, where he worships various
mother-goddesses, including Uma Devi, consort of Shiva, and keeps five hundred women in his harem: ‘Indulging as he did in lust for several years, he came to be known as Kama Ashoka
[kama
meaning ‘love’ or ‘desire’].’
⁷

Ashoka goes to war against his half-brothers and destroys them all to become ruler of ‘the whole territory from the Himalaya to the Vindhya’. He grows ever more haughty and cruel, only finding peace of mind when performing violent deeds, so acquiring the name ‘Ashoka the Wrathful’. Then a Buddhist novice who is a disciple of the elder Yashah enters Ashoka’s torture house by mistake and, just as related in the
Legend of King Ashoka
, survives his ordeal unscathed. Yashah then converts Ashoka, who thereafter ‘was full of great reverence and started spending the day and night in pious acts’.

Yashah invites all the Buddhist monks to Pataliputra for a religious festival, for which the king builds a very large hall. Sixty thousand monks attend the festival, which lasts three months. He then embarks on a second round of conquest to bring ‘under his rule without bloodshed all the countries including those to the south of the Vindhya … the northern Himalayas, the snowy ranges beyond Li-yul [Khotan, thus the Tien Shan mountains], the entire land of Jambudvipa bounded on seas on east, south and west, and also fifty small islands.’

Ashoka then follows the advice of Yashah to collect relics of the Buddha and disperse these in eighty-four thousand stupas throughout his empire ‘as far as Li-yul in the north’. Taranatha goes on to recount the story of the blinding of Ashoka’s favourite son Kunala, but with significant differences from the version found in the
Legend of King Ashoka
, in that here Kunala is rendered unfit to rule by his blindness and becomes a monk.
‘That is why,’ adds Taranatha, ‘though it was his turn to be king, his son Vigatashoka was placed on the throne.’

In Taranatha’s
History
Ashoka’s end follows much the same general course given in the
Legend of King Ashoka
, although he adds a curious detail concerning Ashoka’s last moments. A female attendant who is fanning him falls asleep in the midday heat and drops her yak-tail whisk on his body, angering the dying Ashoka: ‘The king thought, “Previously even great kings used to wash my feet. Even the lowest of my servants is insulting me now in this way.” Thus he died with anger in mind. Because of this anger, he had to be reborn as a Naga [snake king] in a big lake of Pataliputra.’

Unlike the
Legend of King Ashoka
, Taranatha’s
History
contains a brief reference to a link with Lanka, although here the arrival of Buddhism in Lanka owes nothing to Ashoka and everything to an elder named Krishna, who comes to the island at the request of its king, Asana-Simha-Kosa: ‘He preached the Doctrine for three months in that island, filled it with monasteries and sanghas and led many people to the “four stages of perfection”.’ According to Taranatha, this Krishna was succeeded by Sudarshana, who died some years before Ashoka’s reign, suggesting that the arrival of Buddhism in Lanka began during Chandragupta’s reign rather than Ashoka’s – a view shared by some modern historians.

Taranatha lists as the successors to Ashoka his grandson Vigatashoka and his great-grandson Virasena. He tells us that Virasena acquired a vast amount of treasure by propitiating the Hindu goddess of wealth, Lakshmi, suggesting that his loyalties had switched from Buddhism. But he then adds that Virasena ‘entertained for three years the monks all around and worshipped at all the caityas in the world with a hundred items
of offerings for each’. Perhaps Virasena was doing no more than following Ashoka’s doctrine of respecting all religions.

To further confuse matters, Taranatha then introduces a second line of kings he calls the Candras,
⁸
named after its founder, Candragupta: patently, Chandragupta Maurya. Chandragupta is succeeded by Bindusara, who is followed by Shricandra – perhaps Bindusara’s eldest son Sushima – who is followed by Dharmacandra – presumably Ashoka as Dharma Ashoka. Then come eleven names all ending in ‘candra’ not found in any other genealogical table, the last three said by Taranatha to have been ‘very powerful and had reverence for the Three Jewels [Buddhism]’. Taranatha then concludes: ‘Soon after Nemacandra ruled the kingdom Brahmana Pusyamitra, the royal priest, revolted against the king and assumed power.’ This is, of course, the Brahman Pushyamitra named in the
Puranas
and in the
Legend of King Ashoka
as the army commander who overthrows the last of the Mauryas to found the Shunga dynasty.