The Hindus (44 page)

Just as the alternative universe that Vishvamitra creates is entirely real to Trishanku, so the world of the
Ramayana
that Valmiki created is very real indeed to the many Hindus who have heard it or read it, and Sita and Rama continue to shape attitudes to women and to political conflict in India to this day.

CHAPTER 10

As the Hindu idea of nonviolence (
ahimsa
) that emerged from debates about eating and/or sacrificing animals was soon taken up in debates about warfare, the resulting arguments, which deeply color the narratives of the
Mahabharata
on all levels, were simultaneously about the treatment of animals, about the treatment of Pariahs symbolized by animals, and about human violence as an inevitable result of the fact that humans are animals and animals are violent. The connection between the historical figure of the Buddhist king Ashoka and the mythological figure of the Hindu king Yudhishthira, and their very similar attempts to mitigate, if not to abolish, violence, particularly violence against animals, are also at the heart of this chapter.

Ashoka claimed to have conquered most of India, though evidence suggests that he did not venture beyond southern Karnataka to attempt to conquer South India. But in the eighth year of his reign, he marched on Kalinga (the present Orissa) in a cruel campaign that makes Sherman’s march look like a children’s parade. Afterward he claimed to have been revolted by what he had done, and issued an edict that was carved into the surfaces of rock in several places in India (not including Kalinga, significantly). It is a most remarkable document, allowing us a glimpse into the mind—or, at least, the public mind— of a ruler who regrets what he regards as a major crime committed in the line of duty. This is how the edict begins:

That Ashoka renounced war at this point is perhaps less impressive than it might seem, given that he now already had most of India under his control (or at least more than anyone else had ever had and apparently all that he wanted); he was locking the stable door after the horse was safely tethered in its stall. But his repentance did not mean that he had sworn off violence forever; in this same edict he warns “the forest tribes of his empire” that “he has power even in his remorse, and he asks them to repent, lest they be killed.” In another edict he refers, rather ominously, to “the unconquered peoples on my borders” (i.e., not conquered yet?) and acknowledges that they may wonder what he intends to do with/for/to them.
²
He may have hung up his gun belt, but he still had it. What is most remarkable about the inscription about Kalinga, however, is its introspective and confessional tone, its frankness and sincerity, and the decision to carve it in rock—to make permanent, as it were, his realization that military conquest, indeed royal vainglory, was impermanent (
anicca
, in the Buddhist parlance). Here is evidence of an individual who took pains to see that future generations would remember him, and this is a new concept in ancient India.

The
dhamma
to which Ashoka refers in his edict is neither the Buddhist
dhamma
(the Pali word for the teachings of the Buddha in the oldest layer of Buddhist literature) nor Hindu dharma, nor any other particular religion or philosophical doctrine but is, rather, a broader code of behavior, one size fits all, that is implicit in the various good qualities of the people whom he itemizes here as those he regrets having killed, people who might be “Brahmanas, Shramanas [renouncers], or those of other sects.” That code of
dhamma
included honesty, truthfulness, compassion, obedience, mercy, benevolence, and considerate behavior toward all, “few faults and many good deeds” (or “little evil, much good”) as he summarized it.
³
He urged people to curb their extravagance and acquisitiveness. He founded hospitals for humans and animals and supplied them with medicines; he planted roadside trees and mango groves, dug wells, and constructed watering sheds and rest houses. This idealistic empire was reflected in the perfect world of Rama’s Reign (Ram-raj) in the
Ramayana
.

Ashoka made his thoughts known by having them engraved on rocks and, later in his reign, on pillars. These edicts show a concern to conform to the local idiom and context. All in all, nineteen rock edicts and nine pillar edicts, written in the local script, are to be found scattered in more than thirty places throughout India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. The sandstone for the highly polished pillars was quarried at Chunar near Varanasi (Kashi) and shows remarkable technological expertise; averaging between forty and fifty feet in height and weighing up to fifty tons each, the pillars were dragged hundreds of miles to the places where they were erected, all within the Ganges plain, the heart of the empire. Ashoka adapted older, existing pillars that symbolized the pillar that separates heaven and earth and were expressions of an ancient phallic worship of Indra.
⁴
The lions (symbolizing the Buddha as the emperor) on the capitals of the pillars show Persian influence, for Iranian journeyman carvers came to Ashoka’s cosmopolitan empire in search of work after the fall of the Achaemenids. But the bulls and elephants are treated in an unmistakably Indian way,
⁵
stunningly similar to some of the animals on the Indus seals; the horses too are carved in the distinctive Indian style. Thus the pillar combined, for the first time, the technique of representing animals in a uniquely naturalistic but stylized way that was perfected in 2000 BCE in the Indus Valley, and was the first representation of the horse, an animal that the Indus Valley artisans did not have. Indus form (the Indian style) expressed Indo-European content (the horse). (See the image on page 84.)

Ashoka cared deeply about animals and included them as a matter of course, along with humans, as the beneficiaries of his shade trees and watering places. In place of the royal tradition of touring his kingdom in a series of royal hunts, he inaugurated the tradition of royal pilgrimages to Buddhist shrines, thus substituting a Buddhist (and Hindu) virtue (pilgrimage) for a Hindu vice of addiction (hunting). In one bilingual rock inscription, the Aramaic version says, “Our Lord the king kills very few animals. Seeing this the rest of the people have also ceased from killing animals. Even the activity of those who catch fish has been prohibited.”
⁶
Elsewhere Ashoka urges “abstention from killing and nonviolence [
avihimsa
] to living beings”
⁷
and remarks that it is good not to kill living beings.
⁸

But he never did discontinue capital punishment or torture or legislate against either the killing or the eating of all animals. This is what he said about his own diet: “Formerly, in the kitchens of the Beloved of the Gods, the king Piyadasi, many hundreds of thousands of living animals were killed daily for meat. But now, at the time of writing of this inscription on
dhamma
, only three animals are killed [daily], two peacocks and a deer, and the deer not invariably. Even these three animals will not be killed in future.”
⁹
Why go on killing these three? Perhaps because the emperor was fond of roasted peacock and venison.
¹⁰
Perhaps he was trying to cut down on meat, the way some chain-smokers try to cut down on cigarettes. And his own particular
dhamma
became prototypical, since the people are to follow the king’s example; the implication was: “This is what I eat in my kitchen; you should eat like that too.” But his personal tastes cannot explain the other, longer list (rather approximate in translation, for some of the species are uncertain) of animals that the edicts “protected” from slaughter: parakeets, mynah birds, red-headed ducks, chakravaka geese, swans, pigeons, bats, ants, tortoises, boneless fish, skates, porcupines, squirrels, deer, lizards, cows, rhinoceroses, white pigeons, domestic pigeons, and all four-footed creatures that are neither useful nor edible. Also nanny goats, ewes, and sows lactating or with young, and kids, lambs, and piglets less than six months old. Cocks are not to be made into capons. One animal is not to be fed to another. On certain holy days, fish are not to be caught or sold; on other holy days, bulls, billy goats, rams, boars, and other animals that are usually castrated are not to be castrated; and on still others, horses and bullocks are not to be branded.
¹¹

What are we to make of these lists? Ashoka is hedging again. He recommends restraint of violence toward living beings in the same breath that he recommends the proper treatment of slaves,
¹²
but evidently it is all right to kill some of the creatures some of the time. In particular, Ashoka allows for the slaughter of the
pashus
—male goats, sheep, and cattle, the animals most often used both for sacrifice and for food. There is no ecological agenda here for the conservation of wildlife, nor can the lists be explained by the privileging of certain animals for medicinal purposes. What there is is the expression of a man who finds himself between a rock edict and a hard place, a man who has concern for animals’ feelings (give them shade, don’t castrate them—sometimes) but recognizes that people do eat animals. It is a very limited sort of nonviolence, not unlike that of the Brahmana text that pointed out that eating animals is bad but then let you eat them in certain ways, instead of outlawing it entirely, as one might have expected. Ashoka is the man, after all, who gave up war only after he had conquered all North India.

His attitude to the varieties of religion was similarly politic. As a pluralistic king he had a social ethic that consisted primarily of inclusivity:
¹³
“Whoever honors his own sect or disparages that of another man, wholly out of devotion to his own, with a view to showing it in a favorable light, harms his own sect even more seriously.”
¹⁴
Not a word is said about Vedic religion or sacrifice, aside from the casual and entirely neutral references to Brahmanas (Brahmins) along with Shramanas, nor does Ashoka mention class or caste (
varna
or
jati
), aside from that reference to Brahmins. But he does not hesitate to criticize the more popular religion that was the livelihood of lower-class priests: “In illness, at the marriage of sons and daughters, at the birth of children, when going on a journey, on these and on similar occasions, people perform many ceremonies. Women especially perform a variety of ceremonies, which are trivial and useless. If such ceremonies must be performed, they have but small results.”
¹⁵
Small-time superstition is foolish but harmless, he seems to be saying, with an incidental swipe at women. He approves of public religion, however, and expresses his pride in the increase in displays of heavenly chariots, elephants, balls of fire, and other divine forms,
¹⁶
as a means of attracting an audience to create an interest in
dhamma
.
¹⁷
This sort of bread and circuses is cynically developed in the
Arthashastra
(13.1.3-8), which devises a number of ingenious things to do with fire and also advises the king to have his friends dress up as gods and let his people see him hanging out with them. It is one of the great pities of human history that Ashoka’s program of
dhamma
died with him, in about 232 BCE.