The Ark

He was the ancient king of India who converted to Buddhism and initiated a sweeping moral reform. Legends of Asoka are numerous but it's only in the last century that his real history has become known as historian of Sanskrit literature at the University Texas, Patrick Olivelle, explains.

Transcript

Rachael Kohn: His symbol is featured on the Indian flag, but King Asoka was a Hindu who converted to Buddhism.

Hello, I'm Rachael Kohn and this is The Ark on ABC Radio National. It looks like a spoked wheel, but the Dharma Chakra, also known as the Asoka Chakra is one of the symbols impressed on the coins of India's greatest ruler. King Asoka ruled for around 40 years in the 3rd century BC and one of the things he was most keen to promote was a popular morality he called The Dharma. Historian Patrick Olivelle believes Asoka's influence as 'the good thing' was far-reaching.

Patrick Olivelle:He is one of the, perhaps the only, ancient Indian king who left us inscriptions, which can be accurately dated. So we know that he reigned from about 267 to about 221, 225 BC, before Christ, so middle of the 3rd century before Christ, so that much is pretty well established.

Rachael Kohn: But that's after the insurgence of Alexander the Great and his men, when he crossed over into India in 327 BC. Is there a connection?

Patrick Olivelle:Yes there is. Actually Asoka's grandfather was named Chandragupta, was the first Emperor of the so-called Maurya Empire, and came to prominence and to power in the aftermath of the Greek invasion of north-western India.

Rachael Kohn: Who in fact were the Mauryas?

Patrick Olivelle:Maurya is a name for peacock actually, so it's the Peacock Throne. We do not know where they actually came from, there's a lot of legends on that. But they were probably some kind of insurgent group that came to power, overthrowing the pre-existing dynasty of that area, basically the Gangetic Valley. They were known as the Nandas.

Rachael Kohn: So the Ganges Valley is north-east India?

Patrick Olivelle:North-east India, what is today Bihar you could say.

Rachael Kohn: Right. Well King Asoka is hailed in Buddhist chronicles as the cruel king who became an enlightened moral ruler, through his conversion to Buddhism. Now are these pious tales or are there other sources to corroborate this?

Patrick Olivelle:Yes, there's some. Of course Asoka looms large in Indian history, and like any other figures are just that, have been imagined and re-imagined throughout the centuries. But there is an inscription by Asoka himself, who talks about his conquest of an area named Kalinga, which is today Orissa, which is just south of Calcutta, and this area was conquered by Asoka in a brutal battle where he killed quite a lot of people. And he shows in his inscription, his remorse, and he says that he became after that, a [language]which means a righteous king, and he shows his deep anguish at having killed so many people. So there's a grain of truth in that I think.

Rachael Kohn: Indeed, and of course you've earlier mentioned the edicts or the inscriptions. I gather that it was an Englishman, James Prinsep, who deciphered one of the major rock edicts in Delhi, and who identified it as possibly one of King Asoka's. Did that discovery start the revival of interest in Asoka?

Patrick Olivelle:Absolutely. That was the beginning of the modern interest in ancient India. One must realise that these are the earliest inscriptions we have from ancient India. And not only are they the most ancient, but they are the most complete, the volume is immensely large. They come from as far distant as Afghanistan, to Eastern Bihar, to Southern India, his empire was vast, and he placed all these inscriptions at the various corners and centres of pilgrimage and trade routes around India. So we find the earliest inscriptions not just a little bit here, one little inscription, but it's full-blown inscriptional documentation that you find of a 30, 40 year reign of a king.

Rachael Kohn: Why was it difficult to identify those edicts before? I mean there isn't an actual mention of Asoka on them is there?

Patrick Olivelle:No. He is always referred to as Devanampiya Piyadasi, which means 'The Beloved of the Gods'. So that is his personal way of referring to himself, Devanampiya Piyadasi, and the word Asoka itself, is rarely if ever used in the inscriptions. But what is interesting about the inscriptions of Asoka is that this is the first time we find a new alphabet in India, and we do not know; there are a certain group of scholars who think that Asoka actually invented the script, using Persian models, and so in a sense, this was not a pre-existing script, but it was made by Asoka. Or even if you don't believe that, the script was very new and it doesn't pre-exist Asoka by a lot of time.

Rachael Kohn: Gosh, that would have made it hard for people to understand these edicts. When I looked at the inscriptions I must say it looked to me a little like a corrupted Greek. There were a few letters there that looked Greek.

Patrick Olivelle: Actually they all go back to the old Phoenician script, so in a sense you're right. All Indian scripts, as well as all Middle Eastern scripts, as well as all Western scripts, derive from the same original script, so there has to be some connections here and there. You're right. The Brahminic script was adopted for use with the Indian languages and the pronunciation and the phonetics of that. But Asoka himself knew Greek, or he may not have known Greek, but Greek was spoken in the north-western area, and in Afghanistan, in the Kandahar manuscript, you have a triple inscription, which is in Greek, Aramaic and in Prakrit, so there we have the same stated in three different languages.

Rachael Kohn: So it would have aided the translation of these particular inscriptions in Girnar, is it called?

Patrick Olivelle:In Girnar is one of the inscriptions, the place where you have the inscriptions, but I don't think Prinseps had the Kandahar inscription; if it had that it would have been easier to know what they meant. But the script itself was probably lost to memory within about 5 centuries of Asoka, because the scripts change all the time, and people after about probably the 3rd, 4th century, CE, of our era, probably lost any ability to read them.

Rachael Kohn: Well I've seen some of the translations and King Asoka was certainly a reformist thinker. I think he abolished the death penalty and a number of other things, like the over-killing of peacocks for the royal kitchen etc. What else did he introduce into the culture, which was after all, Hindu?

Patrick Olivelle:Right. What we call Asokan reforms had many facets I think. Asoka himself says that he became a Buddhist, as in a sense he changed his religious persuasion at some point. But clearly he was against killing, and he prohibited especially the killing of animals for sacrificial purposes, in a sense going against the tradition of animal sacrifice within the broad Brahmin tradition of ancient India. He also says that he has reduced, not completely eliminated, but reduced the number of animals killed for the royal kitchens, and he used the numbers, as you said. What is also remarkable about his inscriptions on one side, it is a kind of paternalistic preaching, saying 'You should be good', you should be this and that.

On the other hand it is also an articulation of a royal theology. Almost a political theology that is articulating within these inscriptions, and I've written on that, especially the use of the word 'Dharma' and Dharma becomes a central concept of Indian religion, both in Buddhism and in Hinduism. He uses the term as what I have called a catch-all phrase for everything that is good, and his definition of Dharma for example, is honouring your father and mother, being kind to everybody, and the normal kinds of morality. It's almost what I call the family values of America that we have seen in the last 20 years or so. It is sort of rather vacuous, but you can put everything good into it. So Dharma becomes the foundation of his new imperial theology where the King is the father and the good person. So it's very interesting.

Rachael Kohn: Yes, so the use of Dharma widely is attributed back to Asoka's initiative?

Patrick Olivelle:Yes, what I have seen is that - I have tried to argue - is that Asoka's use of Dharma, probably borrowed from the Buddhist use of Dharma. He uses it over 100 times in his inscriptions. I think that was the catalyst that projected this word that is used by a marginal group of Buddhists, to becoming the central concept of all Indian religions. In that sense he becomes a crucial figure and a central figure in the development of culture and religion in India.

Rachael Kohn: And did that then spawn a culture of legal treatises?

Patrick Olivelle:Yes, I've tried to argue that the Brahminical legal treatises that are called the Dharma-shastras, clearly derived from these kind of Asokan reforms. Dharma as a word was not a significant theological term in the pre-Asokan Brahminical writings. It becomes the centre of a new genre of literature post-Asoka. So something has happened there to make that so central that even the Brahmins couldn't ignore it.

Rachael Kohn: What do you think influenced King Asoka in this direction?

Patrick Olivelle:I think the use of Dharma in Buddhism and related aesthetical traditions to articulate philosophy of life and Dharma being the word that sort of encapsulated all of that, all that is good both in a doctrinal level as well as at a level of personal behaviour, especially the aesthetic lifestyle, the monks' lifestyle, the Buddha's lifestyle. I think that's what makes Asoka use that and then not use that exactly the way the Buddhists use it, but to sort of massage it in a way that it loses it's sort of distinctly Buddhist baggage, and to put into it, more common morality. So Dharma becomes the word that carries moral messages.

Rachael Kohn: Now some critics of King Asoka have said that he was not very philosophically inclined, that he was much more legalistic. Now I wonder whether that's because King Asoka was a conquistador, a ruler, of many diverse peoples, and so his interest in law would be foremost.

Patrick Olivelle:That's right. I think he probably was a Buddhist and had some idea of one Buddhism, but even from a philosophy like Buddhism, especially an emperor who had a lot of other things on his mind than religion, takes what they can, and actually what many lay Buddhists even today take from Buddhism, is not the abstruse philosophy, but being good, being kind, the kinds of moral philosophy that many religions preach to their lay people.

Rachael Kohn: Professor Olivelle, I wonder how much Hindu sources refer to King Asoka?

Patrick Olivelle:Some, but not a lot. Hindu, especially Brahminical, sources, they have this strange way of not commenting on what is happening in the world around them. You find treatises written as late as the 14th century that speaks nothing about the Muslims, who are just all around them. So they don't talk about Asoka. But what we have in the recent past many scholars have found, is that many of the texts, including the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, the Law Book of Manu, and many other major texts of Hinduism, written say 2nd century before Christ, to about the second century after, there's a sub-text running through this, and this sub-text seems to be the Asokan reforms reinforced by the later empires such as that of the Kushanas, who ruled India in the first couple of centuries of the Christian era.

People who came from Central Asia, into India, conquered a vast swathe of land in northwestern and central india, and who became Buddhists, and who created huge Buddhist visual presence in India, because many of the visual art of India, the monument building of India at this time, were Buddhist. So you find Buddhism like an in-your-face kind of thing, because you can't go around India without seeing these Buddhist images. And we think that some of these Brahminical works such as the epics, are in response to some of these new reforms which started from Asokan memory, re-enacted especially with these kinds of new Buddhists coming from Central Asia, establishing new empires within India, and becoming Buddhists.

Rachael Kohn: Has King Asoka then been a model for contemporary Indian rule?

Patrick Olivelle:Yes, I think so, ever since the 19th century when of course Asoka was discovered and his inscriptions deciphered, and for the first time you find a major Indian ruler emerging from the darkness of history, and he was speaking directly to us. These are the only inscriptions we have on India, where the Emperor speaks in the first person, and this created great excitement in India and Nehru was excited by that, and of course took the Asokan capital as the central theme, or the central emblem of resurgent, independent India.

Rachael Kohn: How the past lives on! Patrick Olivelle is an historian of Sanskrit literature and Law and Society in India at the University of Texas.

For another adventure into religious history, join me, Rachael Kohn on The Ark next week at the same time.

THEME

Guests

Patrick Olivelle
has been the Chair of the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin since 1994, where he is the Professor of Sanskrit and Indian Religions. Olivelle's current research focuses on the ancient Indian legal tradition of Dharma-sastra. He has edited and translated the four early Dharmasutras. He has prepared a critical edition of the Law Code of Manu (Manava-Dharmasastra). A new translation based on the critically edited text was published in Spring 2004 in the Oxford World's Classics series and the critical edition was published in 2005.

Further Information

Professor Olivelle's University Homepage

The Edicts of King Asoka
An English version by Ven. S. Dhammika, the spiritual director of the Buddha Dhamma Mandala Society in Singapore.

Presenter

Rachael Kohn

Producer

Geoff Wood and Rachael Kohn