Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor (35 page)

It was an Ashokan edict of the category known today as Minor Rock Edicts (MRE), so clumsily lettered that Cunningham thought it must have been copied by someone with only a rudimentary knowledge of Brahmi lettering. It began in the usual declamatory way – ‘Beloved-of-the-Gods speaks thus’ – but omitted the personal name
Piyadasi
and the title
raja.
It went on to give some remarkably personal information about Piyadasi’s conversion to Buddhism and his relations with the Buddhist Church (modern translation): ‘It is now two and a half years since I became a lay-disciple, but until now I have not been very zealous. But now that I have visited the Sangha for more than a year, I have become very zealous.’
⁸

The key words here were
upasaka
or ‘lay-disciple’ and
yamme
samghe upeti,
translating literally as ‘went to the Sangha’. It seemed to say that Ashoka had initially become a lay Buddhist and then a year and a half later had entered the Buddhist community of monks, the clear implication being that he had undergone the rites that made him an initiate monk, which would have required him to wear monks’ robes and live in a monastery.

The edict went on to say how, as a result of Ashoka’s new religious zeal, the people of India who had not previously associated with the gods now did so. It then urged everyone to be zealous in supporting the Dharma:

Even the humble, if they are zealous, can attain heaven. And this proclamation has been made with this aim. Let both humble and great be zealous, let even those on the borders know and let zeal last long. Then this zeal will increase, it will greatly increase, it will increase up to one and a half times. This message has been proclaimed two hundred and fifty-six times by the king while on tour.
⁹

These were patently the words of a convert, speaking with all the fervour of the newly converted, eager to share his newfound faith with his subjects – so eager in fact that he appeared to have embarked on a proselytising tour of the country. The words of what is today classified as MRE 1 confirmed Ashoka’s conversion to Buddhism as given in the
Great Dynastic Chronicle,
which stated that for three years after his anointing Ashoka had remained in his ancestral faith before coming under the influence of his young nephew Nigrodha, who introduced him to Buddhism. This had led Ashoka to visit the Buddhist community and to invite Buddhist monks to join him in his royal abode, after which he had ordered the dissemination of the
Dharma throughout his kingdom in the form of a massive building programme of monasteries and stupas.

The discovery of the Rupnath MRE led Cunningham to take a fresh look at two other inscriptions found some years earlier. The first had come from a cave overlooking the Grand Trunk Road at Sassaram, midway between Benares and Gaya. In 1839 a rough eye-copy of the inscription had been forwarded to the ASB in Calcutta but too late to be seen by James Prinsep and had lain mouldering on a shelf ever since. Joseph Beglar was ordered to Sassaram to find the cave and its edict, which he duly did. It turned out to be another version of the Rupnath MRE – but with the addition of two crucial sentences at the end: ‘And cause ye this matter to be engraved in rocks. And wherever there are stone pillars here (in my dominions), there also cause (it) to be engraved.’
¹⁰

So here was King Ashoka in his home ground of Magadha ordering his remarks about his conversion to Buddhism to be written on rocks and existing pillars throughout the land – the clear implication being that no such Ashokan edicts had existed before. Taken together with the crude craftsmanship and clumsy lettering both here at Sassaram and at Rupnath, it pointed to these two MREs being the earliest of Ashoka’s edicts yet found, pre-dating the more extensive and far better written Rock Edicts found at Girnar, Dhauli, Shahbazgarhi and Kalsi – which themselves pre-dated the Pillar Edicts.

The third inscription to be re-examined was the Bairat-Calcutta inscription, the segment of rock found on the northern borders of Rajputana by Captain Burt back in 1840. In content and appearance it was quite different from the Rupnath and Sassaram MREs, being finely chiselled in large, clear letters on a highly polished surface – possibly a rock face but more probably a pillar.
¹¹
Cunningham and his junior assistant Archie Carllyle
together explored the site where it had been found, lodged under a large projecting boulder on a hillside south of the village of Bairat, and discovered that the boulder stood beside the remains of two monastic buildings and a stupa on a platform levelled out of the hillside. Clearly the edict and the monastic settlement were linked: ‘As the proclamation is specially addressed to the Buddhist assembly of Magadha, we must suppose … that copies were sent to all the greater Buddhist fraternities for the purpose of recording the enduring firmness of the king’s faith in the law of Buddha.’
¹²

As Cunningham and Carllyle surveyed the surrounding area the latter’s eye was caught by a ‘bare, black-looking, pyramidal-shaped, jagged-edged, peaked hill, composed entirely of enormous blocks of porphyritic and basaltic rock’. One of the largest of these blocks, as big as a house, had rolled down the hill and on its underside Carllyle spotted what proved to be the third MRE – today known as the Bairat MRE.

The next significant discovery was far more dramatic. It came at the start of the Cold Weather season of 1873–4 as Alexander Cunningham headed south across the wild country of Bhundelkhand from Allahabad towards Jabalpur in the heart of India. He was, in terms of Buddhist geography, ‘on the high road between Ujjain and Bhilsa in the south, and Kosambi and Sravasti in the north, as well as Pataliputra in the east’.
¹³
As he rode ahead of his party towards the head of the narrow Mahiyar valley, his practised eye was drawn to a stupa-like mound in the distance, out of which protruded what were, unmistakably, the pillars of a stone railing.

At that first sighting Cunningham could do no more than satisfy himself that what he had found was indeed a stupa, similar in size and design to that at Sanchi, but more like Amaravati in that most of its stonework and bricks had already been
removed for building material. Three months later he was back with his team of workmen to begin the excavation of what he named the Great Stupa of Bharhut – the unhelpful word ‘Tope’ at last being considered outmoded.

Ten days of excavation revealed the remains of a monument that in its heyday must have been just as magnificent as the Great Stupa at Sanchi. Sections of two of the four original ceremonial gateways remained, as well as the segment of circular colonnade linking them. Every one of the great stone beams that had formed the crosspieces of these two gateways had been smashed to pieces, but their four uprights were relatively undamaged, as were the thirty-five pillars and eighty crossbars that made up the railings of the surviving quarter of the colonnade. Unlike at Sanchi, these pillars and crossbars of the colonnade were copiously decorated.

The most dramatic feature of these pillars were the thirty almost life-size figures of divine kings and various forms of lesser deities –
naga rajas, devas
and
devatas, yakshas
and
yakshinis
– carved on three sides, in particular, the devatas and yakshinis: semi-divine goddesses and attendants with exaggerated, melon-like breasts, narrow waists and wide hips, carved with deliberate intent to make them voluptuous, and always shown with one hand raised in the air grasping the branch of a tree, one leg entwined around the same tree and the other hand approaching or even touching their genitals.

These female fertility figures were in striking contrast to the male figures found on other faces of the same pillar, carved as idealised symbols of kingship, their faces stern and serene, their arms crossed as if in meditation – although this was merely the sculptor’s way of conveying hands clasped together in the
anjali mudra
or ‘gesture of reverence’.

One of the deliberately voluptuous yakshini figures from the Great Stupa at Bharhut – more accurately,
vriksh devatas
or ‘tree goddess’ embodying female energy and fecundity. These figures are the earliest representations of this central icon of Buddhist art. The tree these goddesses are hugging is the ashoka tree (
Saraca indica),
considered sacred by Hindus, Buddhists and Jains. Photograph by Joseph Beglar, 1874. (Cunningham,
The Stupa of Bharhut,
1879)

(Left to right) A male yaksha, a female goddess and Chakavaka, King of the Naga snake gods, worshipped as water-spirits. (Cunningham,
The Stupa of Bharhut,
1879)

But for Alexander Cunningham the most intriguing sculpture of all was that of a warrior: ‘His head is bare, and the short curly hair is bound with a broad band or ribbon, which is fastened at the back of the head in a bow, with its long ends streaming in the wind. His dress consists of a tunic with long sleeves, and reaching nearly to the thigh.’ The warrior’s dress, his sandals and the hair tied in a ribbon marked him out as a Greek, perhaps a mercenary of the sort that had helped both Chandragupta and Ashoka win their thrones. His sword, however, was indisputably Indian. ‘We
have the description of Arrian,’ wrote Cunningham, ‘“All wear swords of a vast breadth, though scarce exceeding three cubits in length. Those, when they engage in close fight, they clasp with both their hands, that their blow may be the stronger”.’ This evidence of contacts with India’s north-west was strengthened with the discovery that some of the pillars carried mason’s marks using Kharosthi rather than Brahmi lettering, showing that some of the sculptors had been brought in from the Gandhara region.

The Greek warrior carved on one of the rail pillars at Bharhut, photographed by Joseph Beglar in 1874 with a local tribal woman seated beside him. (APAC, British Library)

Scarcely less striking were the many scenes of human and sacerdotal activity portrayed on panels, copings, medallions and other elements of the surviving architecture, sculpted in a heavier and less sophisticated style than either at Sanchi or Amaravati – the clearest indication that they pre-dated them.

By now Cunningham was far more knowledgeable about early Buddhism than he had been when he had excavated at Sanchi, and he had no difficulty in identifying some twenty of these scenes as illustrations of the
Jataka Tales.
Others showed scenes of important incidents in the life of Sakyamuni Buddha – even though Sakyamuni himself was notable by his absence throughout, being represented only by such symbols as a turban resting on an empty throne or an empty saddle on a horse. Just as at Sanchi and Amaravati, three objects of worship were represented time and time again: the Bodhi tree and its Diamond Throne, the stupa, and the Dharma in the form of the ‘Wheel of the Moral Law’, the
chakra.