Ashoka

Ashoka (also written Asoka) was the third ruler of the Maurya dynasty, which built the first empire to cover most of the Indian subcontinent. From his capital Pataliputra on the Ganges, he ruled lands stretching from present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan across northern India to Bengal, and south into the Deccan plateau. Only the far south of the peninsula lay outside his rule.

He is remembered above all for his inscriptions. In them he speaks to his subjects in the first person, calling himself Devanampiya Piyadasi, “Beloved of the Gods, of Gracious Appearance”. He describes his regret over a bloody war, explains his idea of dhamma (righteous conduct) and tells officials how to govern. No other ruler of ancient India left such a direct personal record.

Ashoka is also a hero of Buddhist tradition. Legends in Sanskrit, Pali, Chinese and many other languages celebrate him as the ideal Buddhist king who built stupas and sent teachers abroad. These legends were written long after his death, so historians try to separate what the inscriptions show from what later storytellers added.

Kalinga was an independent region on India’s east coast, roughly modern Odisha. In the eighth year after his consecration, around 261–260 BCE, Ashoka conquered it. His own Rock Edict 13 describes the result: 150,000 people carried away, 100,000 killed, and many times that number who died afterwards. These are the king’s own round numbers and cannot be checked, but they are a rare admission by a conqueror of the suffering he caused.

In the same edict Ashoka says he felt deep remorse, because conquering a country brings killing, death and the deportation of people, and even those who survive suffer when their relatives and friends are harmed. He declares that the best conquest is “conquest by dhamma” rather than by arms.

The remorse was not the whole story. The edict also warns the forest peoples on the frontier that the king, though repentant, still has power and will punish wrongdoing. And in Kalinga itself, the version of the edicts carved there leaves out the passage of regret and replaces it with two special edicts addressed to local officials, urging fair and gentle treatment. Historians debate whether this shows political caution, a different message for a conquered people, or both.

Dhamma (Sanskrit dharma) is a word with many meanings in Indian traditions: law, duty, truth, the teaching of the Buddha. In Ashoka’s inscriptions it means something like a moral way of life that everyone could share. He describes it as “few faults, many good deeds, mercy, charity, truthfulness and purity”.

In practice his edicts ask people to obey their parents and elders, treat servants and slaves decently, be generous to Brahmins and ascetics, spend little and save little, and speak with restraint. He especially urges respect among religious groups, warning that people who praise their own sect and criticise others’ harm their own. For its time, this was a remarkable call for tolerance.

Ashoka also acted on these ideas. He writes that he restricted the killing of animals in the royal kitchen, banned certain animal sacrifices and protected some species, provided medical care for people and animals, planted shade trees and dug wells along roads, and ordered officials to tour their districts. He created new officers, the dhamma-mahamattas, to look after the welfare of different religious communities and groups.

His dhamma did not end punishment or the power of the state. Capital punishment continued, though his Pillar Edict 4 gave condemned prisoners three days’ grace, and he reports releasing prisoners on anniversaries. Dhamma was an ethic of government, not an abolition of it.

Ashoka’s inscriptions are usually divided into four groups. The Minor Rock Edicts, among the earliest, are personal and openly Buddhist; in one Ashoka calls himself a lay follower (upasaka) of the Buddha. The fourteen Major Rock Edicts, carved on boulders mostly near the frontiers of the empire, set out his dhamma and his administrative orders. The Minor Pillar Edicts record Buddhist concerns and pilgrimages, such as his visit to Lumbini, the Buddha’s birthplace, around his twentieth regnal year. The seven Major Pillar Edicts, from his twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh regnal years, sum up his policies late in his reign.

Most edicts are in Prakrit, the spoken Middle Indo-Aryan languages of the time, with local variations. In most of the empire they are written in Brahmi, the ancestor of many South and Southeast Asian scripts; in the northwest, in present-day Pakistan, they use Kharoshthi. In Afghanistan, at Kandahar, inscriptions were carved in Greek and in Aramaic, the languages of the region’s Hellenistic and former Persian administrations. The choice of language shows that Ashoka wanted to be understood.

The pillars are monolithic shafts of polished sandstone, many over 12 metres tall, crowned with capitals carved with animals such as lions, bulls and elephants. The finest, from Sarnath where the Buddha first taught, shows four lions back to back above a band with a wheel and four animals. The distinctive glossy “Mauryan polish” is still admired. Some pillars may have existed before Ashoka inscribed them; the chronology of the pillars is debated.

The edicts often tell officials to read them aloud to the people on festival days. They were thus a form of public communication in a largely non-literate society, and they may have been modelled in part on the royal inscriptions of the Persian Achaemenid kings, whose empire had once reached the Indus.

Ashoka’s grandfather Chandragupta Maurya founded the dynasty around 320 BCE, overthrowing the Nanda kings of Magadha and taking over lands in the northwest after Alexander’s campaigns. He made a treaty with the Hellenistic king Seleucus I, and the Greek envoy Megasthenes described the Mauryan court at Pataliputra. Chandragupta’s son Bindusara extended the empire southward.

Ashoka’s own inscriptions say nothing about his youth. Buddhist chronicles say that as a prince he served as governor in Ujjain in central India or put down a revolt at Taxila in the northwest, and a small inscription at Saru Maru in central India does mention a visit by him as a prince. The chronicles also say that he fought his brothers for the throne after Bindusara’s death and that his consecration came four years after he seized power. The story that he killed ninety-nine brothers is a legendary exaggeration, but a disputed succession is plausible.

Buddhist sources name several queens, including Asandhimitta, Tishyarakshita and Padmavati, and children including Kunala, Mahinda and Sanghamitta; one inscription, the Queen’s Edict, names a queen Karuvaki and her son Tivara. How many of the legendary relatives were real is uncertain.

According to the Sri Lankan tradition Ashoka reigned about thirty-seven years, dying around 232 BCE. His last dated inscription comes from his twenty-seventh regnal year. After his death the empire weakened and divided among successors, and the last Maurya king was killed by his general Pushyamitra Shunga around 185 BCE.

The Maurya empire was vast and diverse, including cities, farming villages, pastoralists and forest peoples speaking many languages. The distribution of Ashoka’s inscriptions suggests a structure of a central heartland in the Ganges valley, provincial centres such as Taxila, Ujjain, Tosali (in Kalinga) and Suvarnagiri (in the south) governed by princes, and frontier zones.

His edicts mention officials by title: mahamattas (high officers), rajukas (rural administrators with judicial duties) and pradesikas, who were to tour their areas every five years. Ashoka himself says he toured to meet people and ordered that he be informed of public business at any time, even while eating or in private rooms. The edicts show a king anxious that officials act justly and consistently.

The Arthashastra, a Sanskrit treatise on statecraft traditionally attributed to Kautilya, Chandragupta’s minister, is often used to picture Mauryan administration, with spies, taxes and a powerful bureaucracy. Many scholars now date much of the text to later centuries, so it should be used for the Maurya period only with caution.

The inscriptions leave no doubt that Ashoka became a Buddhist. In Minor Rock Edict 1 he says he had been a lay follower for over two and a half years but made little progress for a year, then “went to the Sangha” (the monastic community) and became more zealous. He visited the site of the Buddha’s enlightenment at Bodh Gaya and his birthplace at Lumbini, warned monks and nuns against schism, and recommended particular Buddhist texts to the community.

Yet his public dhamma is not a narrowly Buddhist program. The Major Rock and Pillar Edicts never mention the Buddha, nirvana or the Four Noble Truths. Ashoka supported Brahmins, Jains and Ajivikas as well as Buddhists, and he donated cave shelters in the Barabar Hills to Ajivika ascetics. Historians describe his approach as a personal Buddhist faith combined with a public ethic meant to be acceptable to all.

Buddhist tradition gives Ashoka a much larger role. The Sri Lankan chronicles say he sponsored a Third Buddhist Council at Pataliputra, presided over by the monk Moggaliputta Tissa, to purify the Sangha, and that missions were sent afterwards to many lands, including his son Mahinda to Sri Lanka, followed by his daughter Sanghamitta with a cutting of the Bodhi tree. The northern Indian tradition does not mention the council, and Ashoka’s inscriptions say nothing of it, so its historicity is debated. Mahinda’s mission is central to the history of Buddhism in Sri Lanka.

Both traditions say he built 84,000 stupas or monasteries, a symbolic number. Archaeology confirms Mauryan-period building at some Buddhist sites, such as the early phase of the great stupa at Sanchi, but not on that scale.

Ashoka ruled at a time of contact between India and the Hellenistic world created by Alexander’s conquests. In Rock Edict 13 he names five Greek kings to whom he sent envoys of dhamma: Antiochus (II of the Seleucid empire), Ptolemy (II of Egypt), Antigonus (Gonatas of Macedon), Magas (of Cyrene) and an Alexander (of Epirus or of Corinth). These names allow historians to date the edict to roughly the 250s BCE and are key to dating Ashoka’s reign.

At Kandahar in Afghanistan, archaeologists found in 1958 a bilingual inscription in Greek and Aramaic, and later a Greek version of parts of the Major Rock Edicts. The Greek text renders dhamma as eusebeia, “piety”, a word Greek readers would understand. These texts show that Ashoka’s empire included Greek-speaking communities.

There is no evidence in Greek or Latin sources that Ashoka’s envoys reached the Mediterranean kings or had any effect there. Within Asia, however, his influence was enormous in the long run, mainly through Buddhist memory. His image as the righteous “wheel-turning” king (cakravartin) shaped ideas of kingship in Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia, China, Korea and Japan.

In India itself, Ashoka was largely forgotten as a historical figure. Brahmi script went out of use, and within some centuries no one could read the edicts. Later rulers sometimes reused his pillars; in the fourteenth century the Delhi sultan Firuz Shah Tughluq had two moved to Delhi, and scholars at his court could not read them. Ashoka lived on mainly in Buddhist legend, especially the Ashokavadana and the Sri Lankan chronicles.

Modern rediscovery began in the 1830s, when James Prinsep, an official of the British East India Company in Calcutta, completed the decipherment of Brahmi, building on earlier work including Christian Lassen’s. Prinsep identified the author “Piyadasi” with a king, and the link to Ashoka was confirmed beyond doubt in 1915, when an edict found at Maski in southern India named the king as “Devanampiya Asoka”.

In the twentieth century Ashoka became a national symbol. When India adopted its constitution in 1950, the Lion Capital of Sarnath became the state emblem, and the wheel on its abacus, the Ashoka Chakra, had been placed at the centre of the national flag in 1947. Leaders including Jawaharlal Nehru praised Ashoka as an example of tolerant, ethical rule. Some historians caution that such admiration can turn a complex imperial ruler into a modern ideal.

Conversion and Kalinga. Earlier writers imagined a sudden conversion on the battlefield. The inscriptions suggest a gradual process: Ashoka says he became a lay Buddhist about two and a half years before the Minor Rock Edicts and grew more committed after a year. The Sri Lankan tradition even places his conversion before the Kalinga war, and does not mention the war at all. Many historians therefore treat Rock Edict 13 as a considered public statement rather than a diary of sudden change.

What was dhamma for? Romila Thapar influentially argued that dhamma was in large part a policy for holding together a diverse empire, a shared ethic above sectarian divisions, while also reflecting Ashoka’s personal conviction. Others emphasise its Buddhist inspiration and see the edicts as sincere moral teaching. Recent studies, such as Patrick Olivelle’s, examine the edicts as a political philosophy in their own right. Most scholars now see personal belief and statecraft as intertwined rather than opposed.

Chronology. Absolute dates depend on the Greek kings named in Rock Edict 13, the Sri Lankan chronicles and the disputed date of the Buddha’s death, which the chronicles use as a reference point. Estimates for Ashoka’s accession vary by several years around 270–265 BCE. The order and dating of individual edicts and pillars also remains under discussion.

Legend and history. The Ashokavadana depicts a cruel “Chandashoka” (Ashoka the Fierce) before conversion, complete with a torture chamber, and some violent acts after it, including a massacre of followers of another sect. Such stories are widely seen as moral drama designed to magnify the power of conversion, though a few scholars argue they preserve memories of a harsher ruler. A fringe theory that the Ashoka of the Minor Rock Edicts and the Piyadasi of the Major Edicts were different kings has not been accepted by mainstream scholarship.

Epigraphy. The edicts are the only contemporary texts from Ashoka. Scholars compare the many versions of each edict, which vary in dialect and wording, to reconstruct the text and to study regional languages. E. Hultzsch’s edition in the Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum (1925) remained the standard for decades; new inscriptions have been found since, including in the twentieth century at Kandahar and elsewhere in India. The edicts present the king’s own point of view and must be read as royal statements, not neutral reports.

Buddhist literature. The northern tradition (Ashokavadana, preserved in Sanskrit and Chinese) and the Sri Lankan Pali tradition (Dipavamsa, Mahavamsa and commentaries) were composed centuries later and reflect the interests of monastic communities. John Strong’s study of the Ashokavadana shows how it uses Ashoka to teach about merit and kingship. These texts are valuable for how Ashoka was remembered, and occasionally for historical details that can be cross-checked.

Archaeology and art. Pillars, capitals, stupas, the remains of Pataliputra and the distribution of inscriptions help reconstruct the extent and organisation of the empire. Art historians study the pillars’ polish and motifs, including possible Persian and Hellenistic influences, while archaeologists date sites through stratigraphy and material culture. Classical Greek and Latin writers, such as Megasthenes as quoted by later authors, describe the Mauryan state but not Ashoka himself.

The task for historians is to combine these kinds of evidence while respecting their differences: the edicts speak for the king, the legends speak for later Buddhists, and archaeology speaks for neither, but can test both.