Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor (44 page)

De va na pi ya sa A sho ka sa

To this day the Rupnath MRE remains the only place where Ashoka’s name has been found carved in stone on one of his edicts, although it is quite possible that other such examples have yet to be discovered, just as others have probably been lost for ever, destroyed either by human activity or the forces of nature.

In Afghanistan the distrust of the British engendered by the First and Second Afghan Wars continued well into the twentieth century. It meant that when Afghanistan finally began to open up to the West in the 1920s, under the modernising King Amanullah, it was the French who won exclusive rights to conduct excavations in Afghanistan under the leadership of Dr Alfred Foucher, who had studied at the Sanskrit College in Benares and, courtesy of John Marshall, had cut his teeth at
excavations in India’s North-West Frontier Province and at Sanchi. It was Foucher who invented the term ‘Graeco-Buddhist’ to describe the religious art produced in Gandhara, and who argued, like Cunningham before him, that the influence of classical Gandharan art penetrated deep into India and beyond.
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Foucher spent months following the trails of Alexander the Great and Xuanzang across Afghanistan, leading to the discovery of numerous archaeological sites. Under his aegis, the excavation of the Gandharan summer capital of Kapisha at Begram, begun in 1936, and the subsequent unearthing of the Begram Treasure, proved to be the first of a series of spectacular discoveries that provided ample evidence of Gandhara’s dominant role as an international crossroads and as a major catalyst for change in the region before, during and after the Mauryan era.

In the course of these excavations numerous texts written in Greek, Aramaic and Brahmi script were discovered, but only one of these could be directly linked to Ashoka: a triangular fragment of rock inscribed in Aramaic, found in the Laghman region just west of the town of Jalalabad in 1930. This turned out to contain elements of both Ashoka’s Rock and Pillar Edicts in Prakrit language but transliterated into Aramaic script. No further Ashokan finds were made until 1958, when an inscribed rock boulder was spotted by chance at the foot of a ridge beside the ancient highway leading out of Kandahar westwards to Herat. It was a bilingual Ashokan edict, written in Greek and Aramaic. The two texts differed slightly but both carried the same message from Ashoka, his name being written in Greek as ‘Piodasses’. It was dated from the tenth year after Ashoka’s consecration and echoed the prohibitions against killing and respect for others to be found in a number of the Rock and Pillar Edicts.

Five years later a second inscribed rock was found not far from the first in the ruins of ancient Kandahar. This was entirely in Greek and carried the end of RE 12 and the beginning of RE 13. In that same year part of a quite different inscription was picked up in Kandahar bazaar: a scrap of rock inscribed with part of PE 7, written in Aramaic. These finds show that a number of Ashoka’s Rock Edicts and Pillar Edicts or their amalgams, had at one time been erected in ancient Gandhara at least as far west as Kandahar – which is approximately 1300 miles from Patna.

It is John Marshall’s restoration work that makes Sanchi such a delight to visit today. He kept being drawn back to the site, in 1918 writing to a friend that Sanchi was ‘just as beautiful and fascinating as ever – nay, more so than it ever was in the old days’.
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Part of this fascination lay in the fact that his old friend Alfred Foucher – ‘a first rate scholar and a Frenchman of the nicest type’ – had realised that the gateways of the Great Stupa of Sanchi and the single gateway of Stupa 2 were essentially memorials to the spread of the Dharma.
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At the end of the Great War Marshall resigned on doctor’s advice, leaving his unfinished work at Sanchi with a long sigh of regret. The sweetener of a knighthood helped to change his mind and after some months’ leave he returned reinvigorated and ready to serve as Director-General of the ASI for another decade. This extra term allowed Marshall to work intermittently with Foucher at Sanchi for another two years until the latter was made director of the Délégation Archéologique Française en Afghanistan in 1921. It meant that almost two decades passed before their joint masterwork, the massive three-volume
The Monuments of Sanchi,
was ready for publication, not helped by the death of their third collaborator, killed
while providing new readings of the Sanchi inscriptions by robbers who believed him to be digging for buried treasure. Another Marshall protégé, the Sanskritist N. G. Majumdar, stepped in and a limited printing of the book appeared at the outbreak of war in 1939, with a second and equally limited printing in 1947, just as India was in the throes of independence and partition.

Marshall and Foucher showed in
The Monuments of Sanchi
that the Buddhist stupa cult could be traced back directly to the relic stupas erected by Emperor Ashoka and that his stupas and his Rock and Pillar Edicts ‘came to be invested with a peculiar sanctity of their own … as accepted emblems of the Faith’. They further demonstrated that the Great Stupa’s four gateways were Ashokan in spirit and in kind – in particular, the South Gateway, the first to be completed and in their estimation the finest of the four despite its damage.

The South Gateway had been erected beside Ashoka’s pillar and was itself intrinsically Ashokan, beginning with the two lion capitals on its two pillars, patently copied from the Ashokan pillar’s lion capital right down to the geese and acanthus leaves on the drum. What is now the outer panel of the middle architrave shows Emperor Ashoka himself in a two-horse chariot visiting the Buddha relic stupa at Ramagrama and being met by its guardian deities, the Naga kings, here shown ‘in human form with serpent hoods, worshipping at the stupa, bringing offerings, or emerging from the waters of a lotus pond’.
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This is precisely the scene that Major Franklin and Captain Murray had drawn in the early nineteenth century (see pages 108, 159 and 240).

The middle architrave of the incorrectly restored South Gateway. It shows Emperor Ashoka visiting the Buddha stupa at Ramagrama to claim its relics, only to find it guarded by the Naga kings. (Photograph by Andrew Whittome)

The story continues on the inner face of the bottom, damaged crossbeam. This shows the other scene that Captain Murray drew and submitted to James Prinsep back in 1837. On the right a king stands in a chariot with an escort on an elephant, in the centre a city is under attack, and on the left a king is shown apparently directing the siege. This is usually interpreted as a scene from the so-called ‘War of the Relics’, when eight rulers fought over Sakyamuni Buddha’s relics, other and more clear versions of the same story occuring on the architraves of the North, West and East Gateways. But what Murray had failed to show in his drawing is that the giant elephant is actually carrying away a relic casket, which a turbaned raja rests on his head as shown on Lieutenant Fred Maisey’s later drawing.

A detail from Fred Maisey’s finished drawing of the inner panel of the bottom architrave on the South Gateway at Sanchi, showing King Ashoka seated on a giant elephant bearing away the Buddha relics from Rajgir. (From Maisey,
Sanchi and its Remains,
1892)

What is actually being portrayed here is Ashoka’s attack on the city of Rajgir with a ‘fourfold army’ and his removal of its Buddha relics back to Pataliputra, as related in the
Legend of King Ashoka.
He then proceeded to the Ramagrama stupa, which was originally shown on the panel immediately above but was accidentally reversed during restoration so that it now appears on the outer side. It is no coincidence that the scene portrayed on the inner side of the top architrave shows a row of stupas and Bodhi trees being worshipped by a Naga king, a yakshi fertility goddess and, on the left, a human king, presumably King Ashoka (see original photo of fallen South Gateway on
p. 239
).

Other scenes portrayed on the same South Gateway strengthen the case for its being raised specifically as an act of homage to King Ashoka; in particular, two adjacent panels on its west pillar. Again a king is shown riding a two-horse chariot preceded by a giant guard holding a club. The same king then reappears on the next panel, now flanked by his two queens. They stand directly underneath the Bodhi tree at Bodhgaya and the pavilion constructed around it by Ashoka. His posture, his right arm over one queen while the other queen holds his right arm, is most unusual. ‘There we see only a royal personage apparently supported by two of his queens,’ writes Alfred Foucher of this crucial scene. ‘But … he can only be A
oka. Hence we cannot fail to be reminded, by his tottering attitude, either of the immense grief which overcame him when he was told that his beloved tree was perishing – he declared that he would not be able to survive it – or, in another simpler version of the pilgrimage, of the emotion which seized him at sight of a spot so sacred.’

A modern photograph of this scene shows what Lieutenant Maisey’s drawing from 1851 (see
p. 241
) failed to show, which is that the Ashoka here is short and fat, with a balloon-like head. The sculptor could not have seen Ashoka himself but memories of Ashoka would still have been green in the area, which suggests that this image is based on the emperor’s actual physical appearance. It is surely no coincidence that the Brahmi inscription carved on the panel immediately below records that this was the work of the ivory workers of the nearby town of Vidisha.

Other gateways show more Ashokan scenes. At the East Gateway the outer panel on the bottom architrave again shows Ashoka paying homage to the Bodhi tree. ‘He is wearily getting off his elephant, supported by his first queen,’ writes Foucher. ‘Then both go forward in devout posture towards the same Bodhi-tree surrounded by the same stone-enclosure … From the other side, to the sound of music, people are advancing in procession to the tree; and the figures in the foreground are plainly carrying pitchers for watering it.’

Emperor Ashoka faints into the arms of his queens at the sight of the Bodhi tree. A modern photograph capturing the detail that earlier depictions missed. (Photo by Andrew Whittome)