Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor (29 page)

When King Wuyou had just ascended the throne, he believed in heretical doctrines and destroyed the sites left by the Buddha. He sent his troops and went in person to cut the tree. He chopped the roots, stalks, branches, and leaves into small pieces and had them heaped up at a spot a few tens of paces to the west, where fire-worshipping Brahmans were ordered to burn the pile as a sacrifice to their god. But before the smoke and flames had vanished, two trees grew out of the furious fire and luxurious and verdurous leaves.

On seeing this miracle King Wuyou repents, irrigates the remaining roots with milk and makes offerings to the tree so conscientiously that he forgets to go home. But then his queen sets out to finish what her husband failed to complete:

The queen, being a heretical believer, secretly sent a man to fell the tree after nightfall. When King Wuyou went to worship the tree at dawn, he was very sad to see only the stump of the tree. He prayed earnestly and irrigated the stump with sweet milk, and in a few days the tree grew up once again. With deep respect and astonishment, the king built a stone enclosure to the height of more than ten feet around the tree, which is still in existence.

Xuanzang had also to report that the Bodhi tree had once again come under attack, and very recently at that, the assailant being King Sasanka of Bengal, who only recently had murdered King Harsha the Great’s elder brother Raja the Great. Described by Xuanzang as a ‘wicked king and heretical believer’, King Sasanka was a devoted follower of Shiva and an equally ardent enemy of Buddhism. He had set about destroying Buddhist monasteries in Bengal and Bihar, and had made the Bodhi tree at Bodhgaya a special target, first cutting it down and setting fire to it and then digging down to the roots and soaking them in sugarcane juice to prevent them regrowing. ‘Several months later,’ adds Xuanzang, ‘King Purnavarman of Magadha, the last descendant of King Wuyou, heard about the event and said with a sigh of regret, “The Sun of Wisdom has sunk, and only the Buddha’s tree remained in the world; now that the tree has been destroyed, what else is there for living things to see?”’

This King Purnavarman irrigates the remaining roots with milk from several thousand cows and the tree grows ten feet in one night. He then builds a new enclosure round the tree to a height of twenty-four feet. ‘Thus the Bodhi Tree at present is behind the stone wall,’ concludes Xuanzang, ‘with over ten feet of its branches growing out over the wall.’

After his visit to Bodhgaya the Chinese pilgrim began an extended period of study of Buddhist texts that lasted for three years, undertaking it at Nalanda, the greatest centre of learning in the Buddhist world, drawing students from the furthest corners of Asia. According to Xuanzang, all these students were brilliant scholars of high learning, whose virtue was esteemed by their contemporaries and whose reputation was known to foreign lands ‘amounting to several hundreds’. The fruits of
centuries of Buddhist thought and philosophy were contained here and at Nalanda’s sister monasteries nearby. It meant that when Xuanzang finally left Magadha in the year 640 he was able to take with him not only a great many Sanskrit works and sutras in manuscript form but a thorough knowledge of the
Yogacara
or ‘consciousness’ school of Buddhist teaching that through his intervention would spread through China and on to Korea and Japan.

Another three years of travelling passed before Xuanzang finally began to make his way back to China. His return to Xian in Eastern China in the year 645 caused huge excitement and was celebrated throughout much of China. Turning his back on the honours heaped upon him by Emperor Taizong, Xuanzang retired to the newly built Da Chien temple outside Xian to teach and translate. Here he constructed the Wild Goose Pagoda to serve as a library for his Indian sutras and as a translation centre. By the time of Xuanzang’s death in 664, the Wild Goose Pagoda had become the most important centre for the diffusion of Buddhism north of the Himalayas, staffed by fifty translators who had all been taught Sanskrit by the head abbot, Xuanzang. At the emperor’s command, Xuanzang also found time to write what soon became a popular classic of Chinese literature:
Da Tang Xiyo Ti
or ‘Great Tang Records of the Western Regions’.

Under the strong central government of the Tang dynasty Buddhism continued to flourish in China – a happy state of affairs brought to an abrupt end by the events listed in Chinese Buddhist sources as the ‘Third Catastrophe’: the anti-Buddhist persecutions initiated by the emperor Wu-tsung in 842. In the darker centuries that followed, the persona of the monk Xuanzang underwent a curious transformation by becoming
fictionalised as the monk Tripitaka in the much-loved Ming classic novel
Xi You Ji,
or
Journey to the West,
better known in more recent centuries as
The Monkey King,
which in our own time provided the basis for the cult TV series
Monkey.

However, the insularity of the Middle Kingdom and the disdain of its rulers for the outside world ensured that Xuanzang’s
Great Tang Records of the Western Regions,
along with Faxian’s
A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms,
remained unknown and unread outside China until well into the nineteenth century.

In 1841 tantalising excerpts from the travels in India of both Faxian and Xuanzang began to appear in French academic journals.
⁹
The first to react in India was the late James Prinsep’s protégé Captain Alexander Cunningham. In 1842 he triumphantly demonstrated the accuracy of Faxian’s account by using his directions to locate the ancient Buddhist site of Sankisa, where Sakyamuni Buddha was said to have descended from the Tushita Heaven by a stairway. Faxian had placed Sankisa seven yojanas north-west of Kannauj. This ancient city, situated east of Agra in the Doab country, was still occupied even though it had fallen on hard times, so Cunningham began his search there. He knew that a yojana was a measure of distance used in ancient India to represent a day’s march by a royal army, which he assumed to be about seven miles. After riding out in a north-westerly direction from Kannauj for some fifty miles, Cunningham arrived at the little hamlet of Samkassa. ‘The village’, he afterwards wrote, ‘consists of only fifty or sixty houses, on a high mound which has once been a fort: but all around it for a circuit of six miles there is a succession of high ruined mounds of bricks and earth, which are said to be the walls of the old city.’
¹⁰

Bolstered by this little coup, Cunningham called on the
EICo to appoint an archaeological enquirer, a qualified person ‘to tread in the footsteps of the Chinese pilgrims Hwan Thsang [Xuanzang] and Fa Hian [Faxian]’. His appeal fell on deaf years. Four years later he tried again, this time declaring that as the ruling power in India the EICo had a duty to India to protect its ancient monuments, and the sooner the better. ‘The discovery and publication’, he added, ‘of all the existing remains of architecture and sculpture, with coins and inscriptions, would throw more light on the ancient history of India, both public and domestic, than the printing of all the rubbish contained in the 18
Puranas.’
¹¹

Cunningham’s jibe about the
Puranas
was aimed directly at the scholar most closely associated with their translation, Professor Horace Hayman Wilson, and it hit its mark. The EICo’s Court of Directors in London decided that an archaeological enquirer was indeed required and turned to Professor Wilson for advice on who was best qualified to fill such a post. The position went to another protégé of the late James Prinsep, Captain Markham Kittoe, thanks in part to his translation of the Bhabra rock inscription, better known today as the Bairat-Calcutta Minor Rock Edict. This energetic Captain Thomas Burt of the Royal Engineers had found on a chunk of grey granite lodged at the back of a rock shelter on a hill known as the
bijak ki pahari,
or ‘hill of the writing’, overlooking the old Jaipur–Delhi road close to the Rajasthan border. One surface of the rock had been smoothed flat and polished, and bore a short eight-line inscription very neatly chiselled in Brahmi characters.

It was this unimpressive-looking rock that initiated a gentlemanly rivalry between Alexander Cunningham and Markham Kittoe. Cunningham was then aged twenty-six, ambitious, well connected and highly thought of within
military and political circles, even if he sometimes trod a fine line between his military duties and his Indological pursuits. Kittoe was the older of the two by six years, and by his own admission ‘a self-educated man, and no Classic or Sanskrit scholar’, his language skills ‘woefully deficient’. His court-martial verdict had been quashed by order of the Governor General but he was still viewed with suspicion by the military authorities. Yet it was Markham Kittoe whose star first appeared to be in the ascendant, following the publication of his reading of the Bairat-Calcutta inscription in the
JRAS.

Kittoe’s translation had been made ‘with the aid of the learned Pandit Kamala Kanta’,
¹²
and it was subsequently shown to be wildly fanciful, for, learned or not, the pandit had misinterpreted the inscription as a Vedic tract. Kittoe’s confusion was understandable, for the Ashokan edicts so far discovered had all been monumental, whether on pillars or boulders, and this eight-line inscription appeared rudimentary by comparison. Furthermore, all the other inscriptions had opened with the declamatory phrase ‘Thus spake Piyadasi, Beloved-of-the-Gods’, whereas this inscription began
Piyadasi laja magadhe sangham abhivademanam
or ‘Piyadasi king of Magadha salutes the Sangha’.

When more accurately translated by the French scholar Eugène Burnouf,
¹³
it proved to be an order rather than edict, directed specifically at the Buddhist Church, with Ashoka speaking as ruler of Magadha rather than emperor of the Indian subcontinent. After first declaring his reverence for the ‘three jewels’, of Buddhism, in the shape of the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha, the king went on to advise the Sangha to take note of certain Dharma texts as spoken by
Bhagavata Budhena
or ‘Lord Buddha’. It then cited seven specific texts by their
titles and ordered that these should be constantly listened to and memorised, both by monks and nuns and by members of the Buddhist laity.

Buddhist scholars continue to argue over what specific texts Ashoka was here referring to, but they seem to be relatively minor Buddhist scriptures. That immediately raises the question of why the king of Magadha should have gone to the trouble of publishing such an order, for the implications are unmistakable: this was a royal command directing the Buddhist community to toe the Buddhist line according to Ashoka, king of Magadha.

The Bairat-Calcutta inscription provided the clearest confirmation yet of what scholars like Burnouf already suspected: that Ashoka was not only deeply committed to the Buddhist cause but directly involved in shaping its course, even to the extent of making it known what teachings he thought monks and nuns should be committing to memory (bearing in mind that at this time all religious teachings were passed down from teacher to disciple by oral transmission only). It also referred specifically to Lord Buddha, a fact that even Professor Horace Wilson – when finally confronted by an accurate translation – had to admit did rather suggest that King Piyadasi might be a Buddhist ruler, even though he continued to maintain that, whoever else he was, King Piyadasi was not King Ashoka. What no one could then have known was that this was to be the only location where Ashoka had been found to refer specifically to the Buddha in his edicts, that this was almost certainly one of his earliest rock inscriptions to be put up, and that he hereafter appears to have gone to some pains to present his Dharma as inclusive and not specifically Buddhist.

Although Kittoe’s translation of the Bairat-Calcutta rock inscription was wayward, it impressed Horace Wilson – which helps to explain why it was that when Markham Kittoe and Alexander Cunningham competed to follow the trails of the Chinese travellers, the better candidate lost.

So eager was the new archaeological enquirer to steal a march on Cunningham that as soon as he received news of his appointment in May 1846 he set out for Bihar, even though the Hot Weather was well advanced. Kittoe may have been ill-equipped and understaffed but he had what mattered: an English version of Abel-Rémusat’s
Foé Koué Ki, ou Relations des Royaumes Bouddhiques,
specially translated for him by an obliging friend at the Asiatic Society of Bengal, J. W. Laidley.
¹⁴
The information given by Faxian proved to be astonishingly accurate, allowing Kittoe to locate and identify many of the sites associated with the life of Sakyamuni Buddha in southern Bihar. The big disappointment was Patna, where Kittoe could find no signs of its distinguished past as Pataliputra, capital of Magadha. He fared much better at Rajgir, site of the first Magadhan capital of Rajagriha, where he had no difficulty in identifying many important Buddhist sites associated with the life of Buddha as seen by Faxian.

In the Cold Weather months of 1847–8 Captain Kittoe resumed what he termed his ‘rambles through Bihar’. At Bodhgaya he cleared away some of the sand that had buried much of the base of the Buddhist temple there – today known as the Mahabodhi Temple – and in doing so uncovered the remains of a stone railing, the posts of which had been decorated with carved medallions. Without realising the significance of what he had found, Kittoe made drawings of more than forty of these medallions, some of which were
purely decorative, depicting a variety of animals and mythical beasts, while others showed human worshippers praying before a range of objects that included stupas, Bodhi trees and Dharma wheels. He went on to make a more careful survey of the rock-cut caves in the Barabar and Nagarjuni Hills, where he identified four new inscriptions in Brahmi script. He sent his eye-copies directly to Eugène Burnouf in Paris, who established that three of the inscriptions had been set there by order of Ashoka, here calling himself simply ‘King Piyadasi’ without any reference to ‘Beloved-of-the-Gods’. Two of the caves had been donated by Ashoka twelve years after his consecration and the third in his nineteenth year. But Burnouf also showed that all three caves had been donated not to the Buddhists but to an order of ascetics known as Ajivikas, who were neither Jain, Buddhist nor Hindu, but a sect of atheists who followed the precepts of their founder Maskarin Gosala, a contemporary of Sakyamuni Buddha and the Jain philosopher Mahavira. Indeed, it now turned out that the two Barabar caves donated by Ashoka’s descendant Dasharatha were also donations to the Ajivikas – not to the Buddhists, as Prinsep had thought. So here was Ashoka and his descendant bestowing royal patronage on others besides the Buddhists – very much in line with the sentiments contained in Ashoka’s RE 7.