Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor (28 page)

The significance of the iron wheel lay in the Buddhist belief that when a Chakravartin or ‘Wheel-turning Monarch’, ascended the throne, he received from heaven a
chakra
or wheel, made of
gold, silver, copper or iron, its material indicating the length and quality of his reign. King Wuyou, therefore, was a Wheel-turning Monarch, but of the lowest of the three levels, being less than perfect.
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In the year 407 CE Faxian began his return journey to China, but by slow stages that occupied another four years, including two spent on the island of Singhala, or the ‘Lion Kingdom’ (now Sri Lanka). Faxian’s departure from India coincided with the arrival of a new group of Central Asian nomads on India’s north-west borders, a people known to the Chinese as the
Ye-tai
or
Hoa
– the latter form afterwards reaching Europe as the Huns and India as the Huna. By 410 CE the first wave of these Huns had settled in Bactria and Gandhara, only to be moved on by a second wave of Huns, known to the Indians as the
Sveta Huna,
or ‘White Huns’. By the end of the fifth century the White Huns had driven the Gupta rulers of northern India back to their core territories in the mid-Gangetic plains.

In Persia the twentieth Sassanid emperor, the celebrated Khosrau (Chosroes), joined forces with a confederation of nomadic tribes to disperse the White Huns. However, within eastern Gandhara and northern India, isolated pockets of Huns clung on, competing with other nomadic migrants from Central Asia to establish their own petty kingdoms. They adopted the local culture, accepted the religious authority of the Brahmans and, after undergoing various purification rites, emerged as self-proclaimed
Rajputs,
or ‘sons of kings’, and as fully paid-up Kshatriyas of the warrior caste. The most powerful of these new Rajput clans rose to power under the leadership of Raja Harshavardana, ‘Harsha the Great’, who established himself at Kannauj on the Ganges in the early years of the
sixth century and ruled over the Gangetic plains for some forty years.

Harsha the Great’s rise to power coincided with the unification of Arabia under the leadership of the Prophet Muhammad, the start of the Tang dynasty in China, and – on a more humble level – the formation of the Anglo-Saxon petty kingdoms in Britain.

It was during this brief moment of clarity in an otherwise confused period of India’s history that a second Chinese monk set out on what was to become the most fruitful journey ever undertaken by a Buddhist pilgrim. Born in eastern China in 602, Xuanzang was ordained as Buddhist monk at the age of twenty at a time when Buddhism in China was experiencing a golden age thanks to the enthusiastic patronage of a succession of emperors, one of whom – Emperor Wu-di of the Liang dynasty (502–49) – consciously modelled himself on the Indian emperor Wuyou Wang and embarked on an extravagant temple-building programme of his own.

Thanks in part to the accounts of Faxian, India had now assumed almost mythical status in China as a ‘Western Paradise’ where great Wheel-turners such as King Wuyou and King Kanishka had ruled as
Dharmarajas,
or ‘Dharma-promoting rulers’. It was this vision of India as the only true source of Buddhist truth that inspired Xuanzang to make his own journey in search of Buddhist sutras. The emperor Taizong, founder of the Tang dynasty, had imposed a ban on foreign travel. Defying the imperial edict, Xuanzang set out for India in the year 629. According to his biographer, he was a tall, handsome man with beautiful eyes and a good complexion, stately in manner, serious expression and zealous in the pursuit of learning.

Following a more northerly route than that taken by his predecessor, Xuanzang crossed the Tien Shan mountains to enter what are now the Central Asian khanates, then dominated by the hostile Gokturks. Crossing the Amur Darya river into less hostile Sassanid territory, he encountered scattered communities of Buddhist monks who had survived the depredations of the Huns. These communities extended as far west as Kangguo (Samarkand), Anguo (Bokhara) and Talaquan (Balkh in western Afghanistan), where Xuanzang paused to study Buddhist scriptures and to collect the first of what became a hugely important collection of Buddhist texts. Xuanzang then picked up Faxian’s trail to visit the Buddhist community at Bamiyan, where he admired the two great standing images of Buddha and noted the presence of ‘several tens of monasteries with several thousand monks’,
⁷
before moving on to the Gandharan summer capital of Kapisha (Begram), even then governed by a Buddhist king: ‘He loves and nurtures his subjects and venerates the Triple Gem [
Triratna,
comprising the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha or Buddhist Church].’ From Kapisha the Chinese monk crossed ‘steep and precipitous’ mountains to enter eastern Gandhara and the territory of India.

At this point in his account of his Indian travels Xuanzang breaks off to give a detailed description of the people of India and their customs, this information being added after Xuanzang’s return to China by order of Emperor Taizong. In his desire to please his emperor, Xuanzang did his best to match his imagined India with the reality, fudging the details whenever these conflicted with the imperial vision. But nothing could entirely conceal the fact that what Xuanzang found in India was Buddhism in decline and Brahmanism very much
in the ascendant. Purushpura, winter capital of Gandhara, had been a thriving centre of Buddhism in Faxian’s time, and was now all but abandoned, its great Buddhist monuments in ruins. Only the foundations remained of the famous building that had once housed King Kanishka’s most prized Buddhist trophy, the Buddha’s alms bowl. The bowl itself had been carried off to Persia.

From Purushpura Xuanzang travelled north over the Malakand mountain range to enter the Garden Country. Here, too, everything lay in ruins: ‘Along the two sides of the Subavastu River [Swat River] there were formerly one thousand four hundred monasteries, but most of them are now in desolation.’ Moving east, Xuanzang came to the great mountain of Mo-ha-fa-na, a Chinese rendering of the Sanskrit
Mahavana,
or ‘Great Forest’, later Mahaban. Here he venerated a stupa built by King Wuyou to mark the spot where the Buddha in a previous life had cut a slice of flesh from his body in order to ransom a dove from a hawk.

This is the first mention of Wuyou Wang in Xuanzang’s account and from this point onwards his references to the great Indian emperor become ever more frequent. King Wuyou, Xuanzang seems to imply, is still a force to be reckoned with, even though his memorials are often to be found surrounded by scenes of desolation and neglect. To reinforce the point, the Chinese pilgrim adds further detail in the form of tales about King Wuyou, drawing on a number of historical sources that would remain unknown to the Western world for centuries to come – as indeed would Xuanzang’s and Faxian’s own accounts.

After crossing the Indus Xuanzang came to the once great city of Taxila. Here, too, it was the same story of ruination. In
the city’s surrounds was a number of stupas attributed by Xuanzang to King Wuyou, including one to the south-east of the city built by him ‘at the place where his son, Prince Kunala, had his eyes torn out’. Here Xuanzang takes time out to relate the story of Kunala’s blinding at the instigation of his wicked stepmother.

From Taxila Xuanzang moved on to Kashmir to be the guest of its Buddhist ruler. Here, too, the continuing influence of Wuyou Wang is reported in the form of stupas raised and monasteries founded by him, allowing Xuanzang to discourse further on this great ‘King Wuyou of Magadha’, who ‘fostered all creatures of the four forms of birth’. He goes on to tell the curious story of how Wuyou Wang orders five hundred monks who have accepted the heterodox teachings of a Buddhist elder to be drowned in the Ganges. They flee to Kashmir, and when they refuse to return, the king comes in person to apologise for their persecution and causes five hundred monasteries to be built in Kashmir.

After three years spent studying the scriptures in the Himalayas, Xuanzang continued his pilgrimage across the upper Gangetic plains. Everywhere he encountered further evidence of the decline of Buddhism, although his hopes were raised when he reached the country of Kapitha, which in Faxian’s time had been known as Sankisa – the scene of the celebrated event in the life of Sakyamuni Buddha when he had returned to earth from heaven by way of a divinely constructed ladder. By the time Xuanzang reached this spot the stairway seen by Faxian had disappeared. ‘However, King Wuyou’s stone column topped by a lion was still standing’ and was reckoned by Xuanzang to be seventy feet high: ‘Being dark purple in colour, it is made of a lustrous hard stone with a fine grain,
and on its top is a carved lion crouching and facing towards the stairs. On the surface all round the pillar there are engraved various kinds of strange figures.’

The Chinese pilgrim had now arrived at the borders of the most powerful kingdom in India, ruled over by the mighty monarch Harsha the Great. On his arrival at Kannouj in the year 636, Xuanzang was brought before King Harsha and questioned at length about his own country. He subsequently met the king on other occasions and was greatly impressed by his character and the principles upon which he based his rule. To Xuanzang, these principles mirrored those instituted by Wuyou Wang many centuries earlier and were Buddhist in all but name.

And yet, as Xuanzang continued his pilgrimage across what is today Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, the physical evidence of Buddhist decline was undeniable. For all Xuanzang’s descriptions of glorious events of long ago, the monuments and monastic institutions associated with them were for the most part ruined and deserted. Huge tracts of countryside appeared to have been abandoned, even if at almost every stage the Chinese monk came across evidence of the legacy of the Wheel-turning Monarch Wuyou Wang. Outside the deserted city of Sravasti he saw two seventy-foot pillars flanking the eastern gate of Sakyamuni Buddha’s Jetavana monastery: ‘On the top of the left pillar there is carved the wheel sign, and a figure of a bull is engraved on the top of the right one.’ On the outskirts of the abandoned city of Kapilivastu, where Sakyamuni Buddha had spent his early years as Prince Sidhhartha, were two more such pillars, both topped by carved lions and carrying inscriptions. At the Lumbini pool nearby a single column and a stupa marked the spot where the prince
had been born, although here the pillar had been broken in two by a dragon.

Xuanzang noted more of King Wuyou’s stone columns as he made his way southwards across Bihar: one at Kushinagara, where Sakyamuni Buddha entered nirvana, marked by a large stupa and ‘a stone pillar with a record of the Tathagata’s Nirvana inscribed on it’; one at the Cremation Stupa, where Sakyamuni Buddha’s remains were cremated and divided into eight portions; one in Chandu country, surmounted by a lion and inscribed with a record ‘of the event of subduing demons’; one at Vaishali, where one of the eight portions of Sakyamuni’s ashes had been placed in a stupa by a Licchavi king, a pillar ‘fifty or sixty feet tall with the figure of a lion on the top’; and two more pillars outside the city of Varanasi, ‘one on the west side of the Varana River, the other on the east’. The first was ‘as smooth as a mirror’ and stood in front of a hundred-foot-high stupa built by King Wuyou; the other was within the confines of the Deer Park Monastery (Sarnath) where Sakyamuni Buddha had preached his wheel-turning sermon to his first five disciples. ‘Within the great enclosure,’ Xuanzang writes –

there is a temple over two hundred feet high with a gilt
amra
[mango] fruit carved in relief at the top … To the northeast of the temple is a stone stupa built by King Wuyou.
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Although the foundation has sunk, the remaining trunk is still one hundred feet high. In front of it is erected a stone pillar more than seventy feet tall, which is smooth as jade and as reflective as a mirror. This is the place where the Tathagata [‘one who has found the truth’, thus Sakyamuni Buddha], after having obtained full enlightenment, first turned the Wheel of the Dharma.

An excursion north brought Xuanzang to the country of Nepala (Nepal), where he found the country’s Licchavi ruler to be ‘a pure Buddhist’ and its people a mix of Buddhist and Hindu: ‘the monasteries and deva-temples [Hindu temples] are so close together that they touch each other’. Xuanzang then returned to the Indian plains, and after crossing the Ganges came to Pataliputra – only to find this once mighty city all but abandoned: ‘Of the monasteries, deva-temples and stupas, there are several hundred remnant sites lying in ruins; only two or three remain intact.’

These remains allowed Xuanzang to follow Faxian’s directions and identify the city as it had been in the days of King Wuyou, including the site of his notorious ‘Hell’ prison, now marked by a pillar several tens of feet in height, and the great relic stupa south of the city seen and described by Faxian – which had now sunk on one side so that it resembled an overturned alms bowl. The lustrous stone column was still standing but, notes the Chinese pilgrim, ‘the inscription on it has become incomplete’.

The last royal monument to be visited by Xuanzang at Pataliputra was the remains of the Kukkutarama, the Cock monastery sited to the south-east of the old city, built by King Ashoka soon after his conversion to Buddhism and the scene of the great council attended by a thousand Buddhists, both monks and lay-people. This had also been the scene of King Ashoka’s last days, commemorated by a stupa known as the
Amalaka
stupa, taking its name from the cherry plum that had been the dying king’s last possession.

Xuanzang’s next point of pilgrimage was Bodhgaya, where he was shocked to find the temple and Bodhi tree all but engulfed by drifting sand dunes. He comments: ‘Some old
people said that when the statues of the Bodhsattva disappear and become invisible, the Buddha-dharma will come to an end, and now the statue at the south corner has already sunk down up to the chest.’ He goes on to give details of King Ashoka’s actions not found in the
Legend of King Ashoka: