Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor (51 page)

The sick emperor’s determination to send yet more gold coins to his Kukkutarama/Ashokarama monastic centre seems to have been the last straw for his ministers. They turned to the new heir-apparent, Prince Samprati, who ordered the state treasury to cease disbursing any more funds to the king’s order. This was a blatant act of lese-majesty, a direct challenge to the authority of the emperor amounting to treason. But Ashoka was too weak to respond and no one came to his aid. He had, to all intents, ceased to rule. So Samprati became the de facto ruler of Magadha and the country, backed by Radhagupta and the other ministers – but opposed by the Buddhist Sangha, which had much to lose.

It was against this backdrop of growing dissension that the dying emperor passed his last days, as Xuanzang recounts in
the course of describing his visit to the ruins of Ashoka’s Kukkutarama monastery: ‘When King A
oka was ill on his deathbed, he knew that he was incurable and he intended to give up his gems and jewels for the performance of good deeds. But his influential ministers had seized power and would not allow him to do what he desired.’
¹⁹
There follows the pathetic story of the cherry plum fruit, with Ashoka declaring that he now has sovereign power over just half a fruit and orders it to be offered to the monks of Kukkutarama, where it is mashed and served up as soup. Then in his last moments the emperor presents the whole earth to the Sangha, has this declaration set down in a document, seals it with his teeth and expires.

In all accounts, Ashoka’s demise and his subsequent cremation by his ministers is described in the briefest terms and with no protestations of sorrow. In the Northern tradition the minister Radhagupta appears as the key player, resolving the problem of Ashoka’s last donation by taking four kotis from the state treasury and presenting them to the Sangha in order to buy back the earth. The ministers then consecrate Samprati as the new king.

There are serious weaknesses in this Northern scenario, such as the continuing presence of Radhagupta, the chief minister, who manages to preside over Ashoka’s claiming of the throne as well as his deposition forty-one years later. It is equally hard to believe that Kunala’s son Samprati could have played any active part in this deposition since he must have been a minor at the time. What is more credible is the anti-Buddhist faction making some form of reparation to buy off the Buddhists.

However, the most surprising element here is the absolute
silence of the Southern tradition regarding the circumstances surrounding the death of their favourite monarch, the Wheel-turning friend of Lanka who brought the Dharma to their island. The
Island Chronicle,
the
Great Dynastic Chronicle
and
Great Dynastic Chronicle
gloss have absolutely nothing to say on Ashoka’s demise or the succession. This silence is deafening. At the very least, it suggests dismay and grave disapproval of whatever did happen, which can only have been a major setback to the Buddhist cause.

Equally revealing is the disagreement among the
Puranas
over who succeeds Ashoka. The only names which appear twice and in the same order are Dasharatha and Samprati (as Samgata) – and all we know for certain is that Dasharatha was the author of the three Ajivika cave dedications in the Nagarjuni Hills. Perhaps crucially,
The Lives of the Jain Elders
names Samprati as Ashoka’s grandson and describes him as a convert to Jainism who ruled from two capitals: Pataliputra and Ujjain.

The best reading of these events is that in 235
BCE
the Buddhist crown prince Kunala, having voiced his disapproval of the new queen and her anti-Buddhist faction, was sent away to govern Taxila, leaving his infant son Samprati behind as the usual hostage. In that same year Ashoka began to organise his second quinquennial festival in the face of growing opposition led by his queen with the tacit support of his ministers, increasingly concerned at his draining of the state treasury to support the Buddhists. Fearing for his own future, Prince Kunala made his own bid for power – a rebellion that failed, leading to his blinding and removal from the line of succession in favour of his infant son Samprati, but also to the break-up of the queen’s anti-Buddhist faction and her execution. All these events
besmirched Ashoka’s name as a righteous king of Dharma and were damaging to his son Kunala’s reputation as a Buddhist saint and so had to be excised from the Buddhist record. It would explain why in three of the
Puranas
Kunala appears as Ashoka’s successor, his length of rule unspecified.

The death of the great emperor was followed by a free-for-all as his sons competed to wrestle his throne from the appointed heir, the minor Samprati. The initial winner was probably Dasharatha, who may have been appointed regent during Samprati’s minority, but whose support for the Ajivikas made him unpopular both with the Buddhists and the Brahmans. Dasharatha ruled for eight years at best, at which point a second power struggle ensued, with the Buddhists rallying round Ashoka’s chosen heir, the teenage Samprati, who let them down by turning to the Jains, resulting in his being ousted from Pataliputra, possibly by his cousin or nephew Shalishuka, and forced to set up his new capital in Ujjain.

Whether this was part of a Brahman backlash or not, it seems pretty certain that within a decade of Ashoka’s death his mighty empire had fragmented into as many as four or five regional kingdoms each ruled by his sons or grandsons, among them Jalauka in Kashmir, who reversed his father’s policies in favour of Shaivism and led a successful campaign against the Graeco-Bactrians, themselves seeking to take advantage of the power vacuum in north-west India to reclaim Taxila.

The confusion of Mauryan names continues for some forty years until Shatadhanvan emerges to become what all the
Puranas
agree was the penultimate ruler in the Mauryan dynasty, although his kingship may not have extended beyond the bounds of Magadha. The
Puranas
are equally in agreement that the last Maurya ruler of Magadha was Brihadratha, whose
death at the hands of his Shunga general Pushyamitra came in or about the year 183
BCE
, fifty years after the death of Ashoka.

Pushyamitra Shunga set out to restore central Brahmanical authority, gaining a reputation as a violent anti-Buddhist by destroying a number of prominent Ashokan Buddhist sites that included the Cock monastery, Deorkothar, Bharhut and Sanchi. However, either he or his immediate successor Agnimitra (
c.
150–142
BCE
), who was viceroy of Vidisha during his father’s reign, very soon reversed that policy to become a patron of Buddhism – as were several later Shunga rulers.

But even before the rise of the Shungas, other local kingdoms had used the confusion following Ashoka’s death to break away, the most successful of these being the Satavahanas from the country south and west of Kalinga. From about 180
BCE
the sixth Satavahana king Satakarni (180–124
BCE
) began to push back the Shungas, the Kalingas and the Greeks to establish his dynasty as the supreme power across all central and South India. At least some of the Satavahanas were demonstrably Buddhists or patrons of Buddhism.

It is thanks to the tolerance of some of these Shunga and Satavahana rulers that we have the glories of the Bharhut, Amaravati and Sanchi sculptures. At Bharhut, Ashoka has no overt presence, hardly surprising since it was the founder of the Shunga dynasty who had brought the Mauryan dynasty to a violent end – although the sculpted figure of the king bearing a Buddha relic on an elephant on the front pillar beside the Bharhut stupa railing’s East Gateway (see illustration,
p. 362
) may well be a covert homage to Ashoka.

Sanchi had also been destroyed by a Shunga before being repaired and enlarged under one of his successors, but here the Satavahanas had followed and it was with the blessing of Raja
Satakarni Satavahana that its four magnificent gateways went up. It is unlikely that those masterpieces were created before 150
BCE
, by which time memories of Ashoka would be at second hand at best, but still fresh enough for his frailties to be remembered and to show him as he really was: a stumpy, fat-faced and fragile king with a tendency to faint under stress. At Amaravati, however, Emperor Ashoka survives not as he really was but as the idealised Wheel-turning Monarch who bestows his blessings on the world. Here the fainting monarch has been transformed into the all-conquering Dharmarajah.

Ashoka transformed. At Sanchi (left) the emperor is shown as a vulnerable and imperfect human being. Two centuries later at Amaravati (right) he had become an all but perfect Wheel-turning Monarch, the embodiment of the Buddhist Dharma on earth. (Andrew Whittome / British Museum)

Despite the disaster of his last years, the triumph of Ashoka was that he made the ideal of rule by moral force acceptable, a concept
that still pervades much of Asia. Some would argue that his greatest achievement was that by adopting Buddhism, funding it, helping it through a period of crisis, propagating it throughout the subcontinent and beyond, even reshaping it to some degree, Ashoka transformed a minor sect into a world religion. For the next six to seven centuries Buddhism blossomed in large parts of India, becoming the predominant faith for much of the population. Wherever its monastic centres enjoyed the patronage of local rulers and the support of the trading community, Buddhism more than held its own. It survived the persecutions of the Huna kings and Brahman rulers such as Simhavarma, Trilochana, and Sassanka of Bengal – whose tyranny was ended by Harsha the Great, perhaps the last of the Indian rulers who aspired to emulate Dharmashoka as a Wheel-turning Monarch.

But like the Bodhi tree at Bodhgaya, Buddhism needed new soil to grow, which it found in Lanka, Nepal, Gandhara and north of the Himalayas. It was here that the Ashokan ideal of the Wheel-turning Monarch governing by moral force lived on. In India itself Buddhism surrendered to the fatal embrace of tantrism and was to all intents a spent force by the time Adi Shankaracharya began his
digvijaya
or ‘tour of conquest’ at the start of the eighth century. It is unlikely that violence against Buddhists was ever part of this great reformer’s agenda, really because there was no need for it. Brahmanism had learned much from Buddhism and had itself evolved into the Hinduism we recognise today. Priest-led blood and fire sacrifices had given way to
bhakti,
or personal devotion; the ancient unapproachable gods and goddesses had evolved into the kinder deities, such as Krishna, so beloved of Hindus today; and even the Buddha himself had been brought on board as the ninth (and somewhat unfriendly) avatar of Lord Vishnu, a recognition
that Buddhism shared with ancient
Vedanta
the belief that man’s ultimate goal is to transcend self and achieve unity with the first principle, whether it be called Brahma or Nirvana. The downside for Buddhism was that in India its holy places were absorbed, its history excised and those who clung to its heresies declared untouchable. For in the wake of Shankaracharya’s ‘tour of conquest’, and in South India in particular, the Brahmin (as we should now call him) himself remained inviolate, as did the curse of caste, which continues to blight India’s progress to this day.

In August 2010 a highly unusual bill was placed before the Indian Parliament enabling the formation of Nalanda International University, to be built beside the ruins of ancient Nalanda in Bihar. A consortium involving representatives from India, China, Japan, Singapore and other South and South-East Asian nations is now engaged in raising one billion US dollars to build and run the university, which will be residential like its predecessor and made up of five schools: a School of International Relations and Peace; a School of Languages and Literature; a School of Environmental Studies and Ecology; a School of Business Management and Development; and a School of Buddhist Studies. Pledges of government and international support have been received and plans are now well advanced for building to begin in 2011 and for classes to open in the following year.