In India, between 297 and 231 BC, the king pays more attention to dhamma than to conquest, and his kingdom falls apart
IN 297, CHANDRAGUPTA MAURYA abdicated his throne in favor of his son, the Mauryan prince Bindusara. Chandragupta had become a follower of Jainism; according to tradition, he then joined a group of monks and starved himself to death in an extreme demonstration of aparigraha,detachment from all material things.
Bindusara seems to have spent his own reign empire-building. The only records we have of his conquests come from Buddhist texts written several hundred years later. But one of them says that Bindusara conquered “the land between the two seas,” which suggests that the Mauryan empire may have spread down south into the Deccan, as far as Karnataka.197 Apart from this, little is known about Bindusara’s twenty-five year rule except that the Greeks called him Amitrochates, “slayer of enemies,” a name for a conqueror.1
The Mauryan empire was centered in the north. In the south lay different kingdoms: Kalinga in the southeast, Andhra in the center of the southern peninsula, Chera to the west and a little to the south; and at the very tip of the subcontinent, the land of the Pandyas.2
We know nothing of their history before about 500 BC. But we do know that while the language of Kalinga links its people to the more northern kingdoms (a Kalinga king, Srutaya, is credited in the Mahabharata with fighting on the side of the Kauravas), the more southern kingdoms speak a language that appears to have different roots.198No one knows where these southern peoples originated, although their ancestry probably differs from that of the northern Indian rulers; possibly they were descended from intrepid sailors who made it across the Arabian Sea from Africa millennia earlier.
71.1 Mauryan India
Kalinga resisted the spread of the Mauryan rule to the south. When Bindusara died, around 272 BC, Kalinga still remained unconquered. Bindusara’s son Asoka was left the task of subduing it.
King Asoka is known to us mostly through the inscriptions which he ordered carved all around his empire, first on rocks (the Rock Edicts) and later on sandstone pillars (the Pillar Edicts). These Edicts give glimpses of Asoka’s early life. His father sent him to Taxila, now part of the Mauryan empire, to put down a rebellion when he was a very young man. After this, he was sent to another part of the empire, called Ujjain, to govern one of the five janapada, or districts, into which the Mauryan empire had been divided.3
There he fell in love with a beautiful woman named Devi, the daughter of a merchant. He did not marry her, although he fathered two children by her; later, her son became a Buddhist missonary, which suggests that Devi also was a Buddhist.4 But if she told Asoka about the principles of Buddhism, they made no dent in his consciousness. The early years of his reign showed no impulse towards peace.
When Bindusara died, Asoka had to fight his brothers for the throne, and after a four-year struggle he had done away with his competitors. We have no proof that he had them executed, but only one of the brothers is ever mentioned again.5
Asoka reigned alone for eight more years, carrying on his father’s tradition of conquest. Then, in 260, he took an army down south to campaign against the resistant Kalinga.6 The Edict which memorializes the battle gives a bleak picture of his cruelty to the people of Kalinga: “A hundred and fifty thousand people were deported,” it reads, “a hundred thousand were killed, and many times that number perished.”7
This horrific violence seems to have preyed on Asoka’s mind until it brought about a conversion. “Afterwards,” the Edict continues, “I felt remorse. The slaughter, death and deportation of the people is extremely grievous…and weighs heavy on the mind.”8
From this point on, his reign shifts and grows oddly unpolitical. He seems to have spent his time, not in administration, but in the pursuit of dhamma: the Way, the Rightness, the Duty, the Virtue (it is a concept notoriously difficult to define). “I very earnestly practiceddhamma, desired dhamma, and taught dhamma,” the Kalinga Inscription says, and a little later in the same Edict, “Any sons or great-grandsons that I may have should not think of gaining new conquests…delight in dhamma should be their whole delight, for this is of value in both this world and the next.”9
This was a bequest to a royal line like none ever seen in the west. The princes were not to follow on their father’s conquests and do their best to outdo him in war; instead they were to refrain from war and choose heavenly delights instead. “As long as the sun and moon shall endure,” Asoka’s final Edict says, “[so] men may follow dhamma.”10
Asoka’s greatest achievements after the conquest of Kalinga were religious, not political. Most lasting was his calling together of a Buddhist council to reassert the principles of dhamma; this Third Buddhist Council, held around 245 in the city of Pataliputra, gave birth to one of the books of the Pali Canon. At the council’s end, Asoka’s son Mahinda was sent to the large island off India’s southeast coast (modern Ceylon) as a missionary.11 Other missionaries were sent out to Greece, under Asoka’s sponsorship.
But Asoka’s preoccupation with dhamma was not a total abandonment of his empire-building ambitions. He was making a genuine attempt to find a new unifying principle, other than force, that would hold the kingdom together.12 It was the same problem Alexander had faced, in a slightly different setting. The clan system that had survived for so long in India, as a holdover from those very ancient nomadic days, was not one that lent itself easily to the establishment of empire; clan loyalties tended to pull the country apart into smaller political units, each negotiating friendship or hostility with those around it. The Mauryan conquest had temporarily united it by bloodshed, but Asoka had now turned away from that particular strategy. In place of the old clan loyalties, or loyalties enforced by conquest, Asoka tried for a third kind of loyalty: a common belief system that would make all Indians “my children” (as the Kalinga inscription puts it).13
And yet this too failed. After Asoka’s death in 231, the Mauryan empire fell apart almost as quickly as Alexander’s. The Edicts cease, no written records replace them, and a shadow falls over the next decades. Under cover of dark, Asoka’s sons and grandsons lost hold of their kingdom and it separated again into smaller battling territories.
