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King Asoka and the Buddha’s Skull
From the deafening silence department: a pagoda recently unearthed in Nanjing has been identified as one that could well contain fragments of Buddha’s skull. Obama and Somali pirates currently enjoy a higher Q rating than the Enlightened One, but a hundred years from now, he’ll still be giving lives meaning, while high school students struggle to remember whether Barack Hussein was the American president or the deposed Iraqi dictator. Regardless, the discovery failed to grab any large-font print.
No headlines for Buddha’s head only confirms his message, anyway: we create our own misery, with ego-gratifying distractions. Long ago an Indian king got the message so loud and clear that he clicked from textbook tyrant to benevolent ruler. Like Jesus’ Paul, from conversion on he spent the rest of his life promoting the faith, the first monarch to do so. Nanjing’s pagoda was his gift, one of 84,000 he sent across Southeast Asia. Tirelessly campaigning for moral, spiritual, and social renewal, he transformed Buddhism from a modest Indian sect to Asia’s dominant cultural influence. Such is the legacy of King Asoka.
The first half of Asoka’s life was schemey and violent enough for an HBO fan. India’s Mauryan Dynasty, like so many others, worshipped power enough to set brother against brother. After his father’s death (274 BCE), Asoka alone among his siblings survived to assume the throne, over an empire that stretched from Afghanistan to Bengal, covering the Ganges plain and Deccan plateau. Such rich and diverse lands resisted easy control, so Asoka adopted the efficiently merciless approach: handing out death sentences like traffic tickets, devastating smaller kingdoms within his empire at the first reports from his spies of defiance. Although a mighty king, he was chained to the wheel of Samsara, fear and greed his masters.
Life by the sword turned Asoka’s eyes to Kalinga, a realm lying between his and the sacred Ganges River. The times demanded no rationale for aggression, and Asoka soon mustered his armies to attack.
But Kalinga proved a valiant opponent, and the battle grew uglier than any Asoka had yet witnessed. Positioned on the front line, he wallowed in the blood of both loyal subjects and implacable enemies. The victory went to him, but not the triumph. Surveying the mangled corpses of a hundred thousand vanquished enemies, Asoka wept. His despair grew upon seeing even more being led away into slavery, wailing orphans and despoiled widows. Before his army had decamped, the remnant of Kalinga was succumbing to post-war trauma and illness.
Asoka saw all this and felt the guilt for his crime to the roots of his soul; a pity that more warmongers don’t. He alone had unleashed this cataclysm of pain and suffering. It’s romantic to think he turned to the Middle Way on the battlefield. It’s more accurate, and just, that he suffered for two years before converting.
“All men are my children. Just as, in regard to my own children, I desire that they may be provided with all kinds of welfare and happiness in this world and the next, the same I desire also in regard to all.” So reads one of the many Rock Edicts, the reformed king’s Dharma-inspired policies carved into stupas across his kinder, gentler empire.
A man of prodigious zeal, Asoka set about righting his wrongs on a thousand fronts. Slaughter, mutilation, even hunting of animals for all but limited consumption, were summarily abolished. Soon the overwhelming majority of Indians were vegetarian. Shade trees, public wells and irrigation systems eased the lot of commoners, while new universities encouraged professional ambition. Eschewing royal pursuits, Asoka went on Dharma tours, inspiring millions with senseless generosity and reckless acts of kindness. He became what Buddha Himself had defined as the ideal ruler, a devoted Buddhist layman writ large.
Unlike other proselytizing rulers, Asoka extended complete religious tolerance throughout his realm. Likewise did neighboring states have nothing to fear, for as the thirteenth Rock Edict read, “If, by chance, my sons become engaged in a conquest by arms, they should take pleasure in patience and gentleness, and regard the conquest won by the Dharma as the only true conquest.”
Confucius would have found little to desire in Asoka, or at least in his second Minor Rock Edict. “Father and mother must be obeyed; similarly respect for living creatures must be firmly established; truth must be spoken. These are the virtues of the Dharma which must be practiced. Similarly, the teacher must be reverenced by the pupil, and proper courtesy must be shown to relatives.”
Thus did India have its King Arthur, a thousand years before Camelot, replacing the concept of divinely capricious monarchy with that of kingly service. Thus has China benefited from the spirit behind Asoka’s gift, the Seven-Treasure Pagoda, whether or not the Buddha’s remains lie within. Archeologists and other specialists, including the design team for the Shenzhou spacecraft, are preparing to pry beneath the layers of gold, silver, agate and amber. If they do indeed find the Buddha’s remains, it will be instructive to gauge how much, or little impact it has on mass media. Either way, it would have mattered little to Asoka.
“There is no better work than promoting the welfare of the world. Whatever be my great deeds, I have done them in order to discharge my debt to all beings.”
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Another great article. Thanks.
The New York Times reports that a "Chinese Treasure Hunting Team" has descended on American Museums looking for stolen art.
Thanks for reading, ST.
As a history buff I found this article fascinating, thanks!