Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor (40 page)

Lewis Rice’s memorial is his twelve-volume
Epigraphia Carnatica,
but his biggest coup came in 1892, when he discovered no less than three Ashokan Minor Rock Edicts in Mysore
State: the Brahmagiri, Jatinga-Ramesvara and Siddapur MREs – all found in close proximity beside the River Chinna Hagari in the Chitaldroog (Chitradurga) District of what is now Karnataka, about 150 miles north of Bangalore. All three were the work of the same hand, who had signed himself ‘Capada’ in Kharosthi and had described himself as a ‘scribe’, suggesting to Lewis Rice that he had probably come from the Taxila region: ‘The inference is that the scribe may have been an official transferred from the extreme north to the extreme south of the empire, which implies a freer inter-communication than has been generally supposed to exist at that period.’

Shortly before Lewis Rice’s departure he presided over an even greater discovery when a Brahmin from Tanjore presented the newly opened Mysore Oriental Library with a collection of palm-leaf texts in Sanskrit. It included a copy of the
Arthashastra,
or ‘Treatise on State Economy’, which set out in fifteen chapters how a ruler should be selected, educated and directed to govern a well-ordered kingdom. This was a work of almost legendary status that was said to have been in wide circulation until the Hindu kingdoms were overwhelmed by the Muslim sultanates, after which all copies had apparently disappeared. It was then presumed lost – until this one surviving copy was identified by Shama Shastry, the Librarian of the Mysore Oriental Library.

In its surviving form the
Treatise on State Economy
was ascribed to an editor or redactor named Vishnugupta, writing in the early Gupta era, but the original work had always been credited to the Brahman Chanakya, also known as Kautilya, the ‘crow-like’. This was the hero of
The Minister’s Signet Ring
political drama and of the
Puranas
who in the fourth century
BCE
had overthrown the base-born King Nanda and placed his protégé Chandragupta on the throne. Indeed, Chanakya’s
authorship was confirmed within the text itself, for in its penultimate paragraph he had written that this was the work of ‘one who forcibly and quickly achieved the liberation of the mother-country, of its culture and learning (and) its military power, from the grip of the Nanda kings’.
²

The
Treatise on State Economy
had initially been passed by oral transmission by Chanakya to his disciples and they to theirs until finally committed to paper. When it resurfaced in Mysore in the early twentieth century it was quickly recognised for what it was: a highly sophisticated, practical – and in its own time, revolutionary – treatise on statecraft and government that had underpinned the administration of Chandragupta and his immediate successors.

Its revolutionary aspect came from the claim by its author that the key to good government lies not in prayers, sacrifices to the gods or offerings to Brahmans but in trained leadership. The skills of kingship could be taught, but only to those who already possessed the desire and ability to learn, the capacity to retain and to draw the right inferences from what they learned, and the willingness to show obedience to their teachers. Through association with learned teachers the future ruler learned self-discipline by their example, which led to increased self-possession and greater efficiency in acquiring knowledge. Only by being disciplined, learned, conscious of the welfare of all beings and devoted to just government, could a king hope to rule unopposed. ‘In the happiness of his subjects lies the king’s happiness,’ runs perhaps the most famous passage in Chanakya’s
Treatise,
‘in their welfare his welfare. He shall not consider as good only that which pleases him but treat as beneficial to him whatever pleases his subjects.’ These were sentiments that would be reflected in stone in the edicts of
Chandragupta’s grandson, who would have been steeped in the contents of the
Treatise
as part of his princely education.

Kingship was the standard polity of the Aryans in India, going right back to the quasi-mythical King Prithu, imposed on anarchic humankind by the gods and infused with divinity. However, Chanakya challenged this tradition by arguing that the first king was Manu, elected by the people as the person most fit to rule, and who ruled not by divine right but by virtue of a contract between ruler and ruled. So long as he guaranteed the welfare of the people the king had the right to enforce law and order. Being of Kshatriya birth was a prerequisite, certainly, but no king was fit to rule unless he possessed the highest qualities of intellect, leadership, resolution and self-discipline. He had also to take the advice of his ministers and respect his chief minister as a son his father. That chief minister was, of course, a Brahman, and in the
Treatise on State Economy
he is glorified as the only person of equal standing to the king – with the right to depose him should the king became a tyrant or if he impoverished his people.

As his title suggests, Chanakya laid great stress on the responsibility of the ruler to build a sound economy, since good government requires a well-ordered administration with high ethical standards that allow trade, business and agriculture to flourish. However, side by side with these high ideals, Chanakya stressed the importance of learning the cruder aspects of kingship: how to secure and hold a kingdom; what tactics to employ in invading an enemy’s territory and capturing an enemy fortress; the use of spy networks; and the seven strategies for dealing with and overcoming neighbouring powers, which included appeasement, punishment, bribery, deceit, deception and dividing the opposition.

It was this aspect of the
Treatise
that caught the public attention when it became the subject of much discussion in political and academic circles in India in the 1920s. It became fashionable to describe Chanakya as the Indian Machiavelli, a glib comparison that the future Prime Minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru rejected when writing his
Discovery of India
in a British jail. Machiavelli, after all, was a failed theoretician, whereas Chanakya was an extremely successful one who had carried his ideas through into fruition:

Bold and scheming, proud and resourceful, never forgetting a slight, never forgetting his purpose, availing himself of every device to delude and defeat the enemy, he sat with the reins of empire in his hands and looked upon the emperor more as a loved pupil than as a master … There was hardly anything Chanakya would have refrained from doing to achieve his purpose; he was unscrupulous enough, yet he was also wise enough to know that this very purpose might be defeated by means unsuited to the end.
³

Chanakya, it seems, was as much a role model for Pandit Nehru as he was for the grandson of the man he made king. It is an indication of Nehru’s high regard for the author of the
Treatise on State Economy
that when he became Prime Minister of India he ordered the new diplomatic enclave being laid out in New Delhi to be named Chanakyapuri or ‘the city of Chanakya’.

The reappearance
of the Treatise
in the first decade of the twentieth century came in the wake of a raft of scholarly publications, all of which shed further light on the Mauryas. Dr Émile Senart’s
Inscriptions de Piyadassi
(1881) improved on Cunningham’s work and was itself improved upon by Dr Eugen (Ernst) Hultzsch,
whose revised edition of
Inscriptions of A
oka (1925)
remains the standard work on the subject. In Britain Edward Cowell,
⁴
former principal of the Sanskrit College in Calcutta before becoming the first Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Cambridge, contributed to Professor Max Müller’s
Sacred Books of the East
series and joined with Robert Alexander Neil, translator of the Buddhist
Jataka Tales,
to produce the
Divyavadana
or ‘Buddhist Tales’. In Ceylon the pioneering work by George Turnour was taken up by two of a later generation of Ceylon Civil Service administrators: Robert Caesar Childers and Thomas Rhys Davids. In 1872 Childers became Sub-librarian at the India Office and in that same year published the first part of his
Dictionary of the Pali Language.
He subsequently became the first Professor of Pali at London University but died in 1876, whereupon Rhys Davids then assumed his mantle, going on to form the Pali Text Society in 1881.

Within the Indian subcontinent the Archaeological Survey of India went through another bad patch as local provinces sought to reassert themselves. The two Afghan Wars had ensured that Afghanistan remained out of bounds and a very similar state of affairs existed in Nepal, where its Rana rulers remained deeply suspicious of the British government in India and its intentions. However, that situation changed when in the mid-1890s reports began to be received of an inscribed pillar known locally as
Bimasenaki nigali
or ‘Bhim Sen’s smoking pipe’, said to have been seen by the Nepalese governor of Western Nepal. In March 1895 Dr Anton Führer, archaeological surveyor to the government of the North-West Provinces and Oude (today Uttar Pradesh), was authorised to cross the border on an elephant. He duly located two sections of a monumental pillar, the shorter and lower shaft of which bore a short inscription in Brahmi, slightly damaged but readable.

The Nigliva Sagar inscription, erected by Emperor Ashoka twenty years after his consecration. Photographed by Anton Führer in 1895. (APAC, British Library)

Führer sent a copy of the inscription to his mentor and patron Dr Georg Bühler, by then Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Vienna, who showed it to be a hitherto unknown form of Ashokan memorial. It reads (in a modern translation by Professor Harry Falk):

When king Priyadarsin, dear to the gods, was consecrated for this 14th regal year he enlarged the stupa of Buddha Konagamana to double its size. When he was consecrated for his 20th [?] regnal year he came in person and paid homage and had a stone pillar erected.
⁵

The inscription showed that in the fourteenth year of his reign as anointed ruler – or about the year 256
BCE
– Ashoka had ordered the enlarging of an existing memorial to Buddha Konagamana, one of the Buddhas said to have preceded Buddha Sakyamuni. He had then visited the site himself six years later, in about 250
BCE
. The Chinese traveller Xuanzang had seen just such a stupa together with an Ashokan pillar south-east of the city of Kapilavastu.

Despite their best efforts, Cunningham and his colleagues had failed to locate both Kapilavastu, the city where Sakyamuni had been raised as Prince Siddhartha, and Lumbini, the nearby garden in which he had been born.

Führer’s discovery initiated a race to find that fabled city and the Lumbini Garden, because Xuanzang and his compatriot Faxian had both placed Lumbini near Kapilavastu, and Kapilavastu several days’ journey east of Sravasti, located by Alexander Cunningham back in 1863. The full story of the race to find these two prime Buddhist sites has been told elsewhere.
⁶
It tells how in November 1896 Dr Führer was again allowed to enter Nepalese territory, only to be escorted to the camp of the local governor, General Khadga Shumsher Rana, and shown a standing pillar with a prominent crack running down from the top. The general’s sappers then dug round the base of the pillar to a depth of about five feet to uncover four and a half lines of beautifully cut Brahmi, perfectly preserved.

When Führer read the phrase at the end of the second line –
hida budhe jate sakyamuni,
or ‘here the Buddha was born, the sage of the Sakyas’ – the significance of these four and a half lines at once became apparent. He knew he had found Lumbini. Xuanzang had described Ashoka’s pillar as split in half by a dragon, and here was that split very much in evidence on
what remained of the pillar (see illustration,
p. 303
). Scholars continue to dispute the exact meaning of the last sentence but there is nothing ambiguous about the rest (Professor Falk’s translation):