A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [84]
There must have been somebody to read these words out to the mostly illiterate citizens, who would probably have received them not only with pleasure but with considerable relief, for Ashoka had not always been so concerned for their welfare. He’d started out not as a gentle and generous philosopher but as a ruthless and brutal youth, following in the military footsteps of his grandfather, Chandragupta, who had risen to the throne following a military campaign that created a huge empire reaching from Kandahar in modern Afghanistan in the west to Bangladesh in the east. This included the great majority of modern India, and was the largest empire in Indian history.
In 268 BC Ashoka took his place on the throne – but not without considerable struggle. Buddhist writings tell us that in order to do so he killed ‘ninety-nine of his brothers’ – presumably metaphorical as well as actual brothers. The same writings create a legend of Ashoka’s pre-Buddhist days as filled with self-indulgent frivolity and cruelty. When he became emperor he set out to complete the occupation of the whole subcontinent and attacked the independent state of Kalinga – modern-day Orissa on the east coast. It was a savage, brutal assault and one which seems afterwards to have thrown Ashoka into a state of terrible remorse. He changed his whole way of life, embracing the defining concept of Dharma, a virtuous path that guides the follower through a life of selflessness, piety, duty, good conduct and decency. Dharma is applied in many religions, including Sikhism, Jainism and of course Hinduism – but Ashoka’s idea of Dharma was filtered through the Buddhist faith. He described his remorse and announced his conversion to his people through an edict:
The Kalinga country was conquered by the king, Beloved of the Gods, in the eighth year of his reign. 150,000 persons were carried away captive, 100,000 were slain, and many times that number died. Immediately after the Kalingas had been conquered, the king became intensely devoted to the study of Dharma …
The Beloved of the Gods, conqueror of the Kalingas, is moved to remorse now. For he has felt profound sorrow and regret because the conquest of a people previously unconquered involves slaughter, death and deportation.
From then on Ashoka set out to redeem himself – to reach out to his people. To do so, he wrote his edicts not in Sanskrit, the ancient Classical language that would later become the official language of the state, but in the appropriate local dialect couched in everyday speech.
With his conversion Ashoka renounced war as an instrument of state policy and adopted human benevolence as the solution to the world’s problems. While he was inspired by the teachings of Buddha – and his son was the first Buddhist missionary to Sri Lanka – he did not impose Buddhism on his empire. Ashoka’s state was in a very particular sense a secular one. The Nobel Prize-winning Indian economist and philosopher Amartya Sen comments:
The state has to keep a distance from all religion. Buddhism doesn’t become an official religion. All other religions have to be tolerated and treated with respect. So secularism in the Indian form means not ‘no religion in government matters’, but ‘no favouritism of any religion over any other’.
Religious freedom, conquest of self, the need for all citizens and leaders to listen to others and to debate ideas, human rights for all, both men and women, and the importance given to education and health, the ideas Ashoka promulgated in his empire, all remain central in Buddhist thinking. There’s still today a kingdom in the Indian sub-continent that is run on Buddhist principles – the small Kingdom of Bhutan, sandwiched between northern India and China. Michael Rutland is a Bhutanese citizen and the Hon. Consul