Ashoka

Almost every ancient ruler reaches us through other people. Ashoka is the rare exception, because he had his own proclamations cut into rock faces and onto polished sandstone pillars, and enough of them survive to fill a book. They run from Kandahar in modern Afghanistan to Karnataka in the south, in Brahmi and Kharosthi script, in Middle Indo-Aryan dialects, and in Greek and Aramaic where he was addressing populations who read them.

They were unreadable for most of two thousand years. James Prinsep, working in Calcutta, deciphered the Brahmi script in 1837 and found a king who never gives a personal name in the great majority of the inscriptions, calling himself only Devanampiya Piyadasi, Beloved of the Gods, He Who Looks On With Affection. The identification with the Ashoka of Buddhist tradition rested for decades on Sri Lankan chronicles until a minor rock edict discovered at Maski in 1915 used the two together, and further copies at Gujarra and Nittur confirmed it.

The result is a text that behaves like no other ancient royal record. It is addressed to subjects rather than to gods or posterity, it repeats itself deliberately so the message survives copying, and it instructs officials to have it read aloud on fixed days. The pillar at Lumbini records that the king came in person, worshipped, and cut the village's tax rate, which is at once a religious act, an administrative order and a receipt.

The thirteenth major rock edict describes the conquest of Kalinga, counts the deported, the dead and those who died afterwards, and says that the king felt remorse. It is an extraordinary document for a conquering monarch to publish, and it is the pivot of the whole corpus: from that point the edicts turn to a programme the king calls dhamma.

What dhamma means in the edicts is narrower and stranger than the word suggests. It is a public ethic rather than a body of doctrine: restraint in speech, generosity to brahmins and ascetics of every school, obedience to parents and elders, care in the treatment of servants and animals, and the appointment of officers to promote it. The edicts endow no monasteries in the way later tradition claims, and they take care to name the Buddhist community alongside the Ajivikas, the Jains and the brahmins. A ruler's ethic addressed to a plural population is not the same thing as a state religion, and reading the two as identical is the most common error made about him.

The later Buddhist tradition, above all the Sri Lankan Mahavamsa and the north Indian Divyavadana, tells a fuller and far more dramatic story: a bloodstained youth, a mass conversion, eighty four thousand stupas, and the patronage of a great council at Pataliputra. None of that council appears in the inscriptions. The two Ashokas, the one who speaks in stone and the one the chronicles built, are both historically important, and they are not the same figure.