The Edicts of Ashoka

The edicts survive in three groups. The minor rock edicts are the earliest and the briefest. The fourteen major rock edicts, cut at the edges of the empire from Girnar in the west to Dhauli in the east and Kandahar in the northwest, carry the substance. The pillar edicts, on polished sandstone columns with animal capitals, come late in the reign.

Their subject is what the emperor calls dhamma, a word he never defines doctrinally. What he lists instead is conduct: obedience to parents and elders, courtesy to servants, generosity to brahmins and to ascetics of every persuasion, restraint in expenditure and in acquisition, and above all abstention from injury to living beings. He records that the royal kitchen has cut its slaughter of animals to two peacocks and a deer, and that even that will stop. He records the digging of wells, the planting of shade trees along roads, and the provision of medical herbs for people and for animals.

Two passages are quoted more than the rest. In the thirteenth major rock edict Ashoka describes the conquest of Kalinga, the deportations and the dead, and states that he feels remorse, and that the sound of the drum has been replaced by the sound of dhamma. In the twelfth he instructs that all sects be honoured, that a man who exalts his own sect while disparaging another damages his own, and that concord is better than separate praise.

The edicts matter to historians for a reason unconnected with their contents. In the thirteenth major rock edict Ashoka lists five kings to whom he says he has sent envoys, and the names are Hellenistic: Antiochus, and beyond him Ptolemy, Antigonus, Magas and Alexander. Those reigns are datable from Greek and Egyptian evidence, and their overlap fixes the passage to a narrow window in the middle of the third century BCE. It is one of the few firm chronological pegs in early Indian history, and the dating of the Mauryan dynasty, and through it a great deal else, hangs from it.

The inscriptions were also lost. The Brahmi script fell out of use and the pillars stood unread for centuries; a fourteenth century sultan of Delhi moved two of them without knowing what they said. James Prinsep deciphered Brahmi in 1837 and the emperor named in the texts as Piyadasi, the beloved of the gods, was then matched with the Ashoka of the Buddhist chronicles.

How Buddhist the edicts are is still argued. Ashoka names the Buddha, the sangha and specific texts in the minor edicts, and one inscription threatens expulsion for monks who divide the order. But the dhamma proclaimed to the empire at large is a civic ethic rather than a doctrine, addressed to a population of many persuasions, and Romila Thapar and others read it as a policy of imperial cohesion as much as a confession of faith.