Chapter 2. The first encounter with royal power: the Aśokan model

In the middle of the third century BCE, Buddhism encountered its first empire. It had already dealt with kings for a century: Bimbisāra's Bamboo Grove, Ajātaśatru's supplies, and the withdrawal of support by the laypeople of Kauśāmbī. But those were relationships between a city and a monastic community. Aśoka offered something on another scale: the routes, tax system, and legitimacy of an entire subcontinent. The structure established in this encounter was recorded in Chapter 2 of the Introduction. This volume calls it the Dharma-protecting king model: the king gives land, tax exemptions, and certification of orthodoxy; the monks give merit, legitimacy, and moral instruction. This chapter examines the details of the contract's first signing. Within them lie anticipations of the next two thousand years.

Following this volume's habit in reading archives, two Aśokas must first be separated, the one on stone and the one on palm leaves. Aśoka on stone is the figure in the inscriptions: remorse after the Kaliṅga campaign and rock inscriptions everywhere urging "Dharma." Yet the "Dharma" of the inscriptions consists mainly of general royal virtues, filial respect, honesty, less killing, and tolerance of religious groups, with almost no specifically Buddhist doctrine. Nor was Buddhism the only religion he supported. Aśoka on palm leaves is the figure in the Life of Aśoka and the Mahāvaṃsa: the model protector who turns from evil to good, eighty-four thousand stūpas, support for a hundred thousand monks, a council convened under his direction, and exclusive reverence for the true Dharma. The gap between these two archives is itself this chapter's first piece of evidence.1

Aśoka on stone did take several actions specifically concerning Buddhism, all at the institutional level. The schism edicts at Sarnath, Sanchi, and Kosam order those who split the community to wear white and live outside it. For the first time, royal law endorses "who counts as the legitimate monastic community." The Bhabru edict recommends seven teachings to the community and wishes monks, nuns, laymen, and laywomen to study them regularly. The king's hand reaches for the first time into the selection of doctrinal texts. The Lumbinī pillar records his personal visit to the Buddha's birthplace and a reduction in the village's taxes. Pilgrimage and fiscal policy are linked for the first time. Taken separately, each act is a favor. Taken together, they are something new: the state begins to hold opinions on Buddhism's internal affairs.

What the community gains in this exchange is clear. Routes: the empire's roads and diplomatic system give missions an intercontinental scale for the first time. Mahinda's entry into Ceylon is diplomacy on a prince's scale, and the various missions travel along imperial routes. Property: royal monasteries, caves, stūpas, and estates. And the most valuable item, certification of orthodoxy: adjudication of doctrine at Pāṭaliputra is backed by the king, and expulsions are carried out by royal command, as Essay 2, Chapter 2 recorded. What does the king gain? What an emerging empire most lacks, a language of legitimacy that crosses regions. Brahmanical legitimacy is tied to caste and sacrifice, local and exclusive. Buddhism's "Dharma" does not ask about birth status and can spread along the roads, fitting a regime that has just annexed South Asia. Neither party is deceiving the other. It is an exchange willingly entered by both.

The furthest-reaching route in this contract deserves separate treatment: missions beyond national boundaries. Why would a ruler pay to send a religious group outside his realm? The two archives each supply half an answer. The answer on stone is conquest by Dharma. Rock Edict XIII declares that after Kaliṅga the highest conquest lies no longer in arms but in Dharma. It names five Hellenistic rulers to whom he has sent envoys to spread Dharma: Antiochus, Ptolemy, Antigonus, Magas, and Alexander. Related edicts also speak of providing medicine for humans and animals beyond the realm. Two things should be noted. "Dharma" here is still his general morality, not necessarily a Buddhist monopoly. The envoys also travel through an existing diplomatic network. His grandfather and Seleucus had exchanged ambassadors, and Kandahar under his rule bore a Greek-Aramaic bilingual edict. Conquest by Dharma substitutes for military conquest. It is the prestige diplomacy of a repentant empire, and envoys of Dharma extend the work of state envoys.2

The answer on palm leaves changes the initiator to the monastic community. Moggaliputta Tissa sends out the nine missions, while the king supplies their standing and travel expenses. This half has its rationale too. The missionary vocation was already written into the community's charter. Soon after the first turning of the Dharma wheel, sixty disciples were sent out with the injunction "Let no two travel the same road." The community was a missionary organization from birth; Aśoka added roads and funding.3

The details of the Ceylon case reveal a third layer. Before Mahinda crossed the sea, Devānampiya Tissa received a complete set of consecration gifts from Aśoka and underwent a second coronation. Even his royal title, "Beloved of the Gods" (Devānampiya), was shared with Aśoka. First establish ties of suzerain and vassal, then send the gift of the Dharma. In this sequence, Buddhism is part of the rites of investiture, a mark of the suzerain relationship. As the rules require, this layer is marked as this volume's conjecture. Every comparable case found in which transmission preceded alliance, or succeeded without alliance, reduces its weight.

A further comparison suggests a hypothesis about survival, but it requires keeping the two records distinct. Ceylon received the complete package: the monks' ordination lineage, followed by the nuns' lineage through Saṅghamittā, together with sacred objects such as a branch of the bodhi tree. The inscriptions' Hellenistic kings and the chronicles' nine missions belong to different records; they cannot simply be treated as a single list. The inscriptions' language of conquest by dhamma does not by itself establish that Buddhist ordination lineages were planted in those kingdoms. This book has not established whether Buddhist congregations remained there or whether Greek sources name the envoys: as the note explains, the necessary survey of the relevant literature has not been made. What remains is a hypothesis to test: missionary survival may depend less on what is said than on whether an ordination chain takes root.4

Did the receiving land's indigenous religions not resist? They did, but the form depended on how institutionalized the opponent was. Ceylon then had no institutionalized rival. Worship of yakṣas and nāgas had no writing and no priestly group, and Brahmanism had little strength on the island. Once the royal house turned, the whole island followed. Friction left only mythic remnants in the chronicles: the Buddha flying to the island three times to expel yakṣas, missionary elders subduing nāga kings. Stories of subduing demons and dragons are the form memory takes after resistance has been digested. The old gods are not destroyed either. They are entered on the roster of Dharma protectors. Buddhism has used this method of absorption for two thousand years, applying it in turn to Ceylon's yakṣas, Burma's nats, Tibet's Bön deities, and Japan's local gods (individual cases in Essays 9, 12, and 13). It is the counterpart of "absorbing the Buddha as an avatar of Viṣṇu." Buddhism is equally adept at the displacement by absorption described in Chapter 2 of the Introduction when dealing with lesser gods. Truly hard resistance comes when the opponent also has a priestly stratum and a written tradition. Tibet's Bön and old aristocracy, and China's literati and classical learning, will be the principal subjects of later essays. Here only the first data point of the pattern is established: open ground is easy to sow; a land full of temples is hard to evangelize.

The ordinary half of the explanation must first be given its full weight. Without this deal, Buddhism would probably have remained a respected local religion in the Ganges basin. Imperial expansion was the first force enabling it to become a religion of Asia. The costs emerge from the same place. First, the precedent of transferring the authority to certify legitimacy is established. The line traced in Essay 2 connects here with an institution. Second, the community's fortunes are henceforth tied to the rise and fall of dynasties. After the Mauryan Empire collapsed, Buddhist texts immediately left memories of persecution, the story of Puṣyamitra destroying stūpas. Whatever its measure of historical truth, the fear is real.5 Brahmanical archives record something else of the same king: he performed two horse sacrifices. One king, two archives. He need not have hated anyone; he simply shifted the source of his legitimacy from renunciants back to priests. Third, and deepest, the community learned to narrate itself to royal power. Half the language of merit was henceforth addressed to the court.

The rules require an explicit marker: the following is this volume's conjecture. The perfect Dharma-protecting king in Buddhist texts is a model carefully maintained by the community. To portray Aśoka as a wheel-turning sage king who first did evil and then good, gaining blessings through the Dharma, is to hand every subsequent ruler a reproducible model contract: act this way, and these blessings follow. The corroborating evidence is that the Life of Aśoka line of texts dwells precisely on the things the community most needs royal power to do: give stūpas, support monks, repent, and accept entrustment of the teaching. The more complex Aśoka of the inscriptions has been rendered in a single color within Buddhist memory. If Buddhist Aśoka narratives took shape before the period when the community needed new dynasties, or their contents are markedly at odds with the community's interests, this conjecture does not stand.

Pāṭaliputra had a further consequence that must be recorded separately for winners and losers. The winners were the Vibhajjavāda line. It defined orthodoxy at the council, and its members led the missions; Mahinda belonged to this line. The southern chronicles naturally portray this as a victory of the true Dharma. Having tasted its benefits, the tradition thereafter incorporated "royal purification of the community" into its own narrative of orthodoxy. Later royal purges in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia are consistently recorded in Buddhist texts as protection of the Dharma, not interference. The office of Saṅgharāja, or head of the monastic community, and the community's laws institutionalize these benefits.

The losers' lesson, as this book conjectures, likewise took shape. Expelled and marginalized schools remembered the other half: without a king, you are the one purged. Each therefore found its own king. Sarvāstivāda took root in the northwest and awaited the Kuṣāṇas. In structural comparison, the council and the Mahāvibhāṣā in Kaniṣka's age resemble a Sarvāstivāda replay of the Pāṭaliputra model: a different king, a different orthodoxy. This is this book's comparative inference, not something recorded in the historical sources.6 Pāṭaliputra's truly far-reaching influence lies here. It did not create a unified orthodoxy. It taught everyone at once that "orthodoxy can be manufactured by royal power." Thereafter, every Indian school needed a king. The polycentric subcontinent could support many kings and therefore many orthodoxies. An island with a single royal power moved toward freezing (the next chapter); a continent with many royal powers moved toward competition. One contract, two geographies, two outcomes.

Another account reaches deeper. Sasaki Shizuka and scholars following his approach conjecture that, precisely to preserve monastic unity in Aśoka's age, schism was redefined as procedural separation. Doctrinal differences ceased to constitute schism. If this account holds, Pāṭaliputra's legal legacy happened to leave legitimate room for Mahāyāna to develop within the schools several hundred years later. This layer is treated as one account among others. The procedural definition of schism used in Essay 4, Chapter 1 may have its origins here.7

The Dharma-protecting king model: two sides of one contract

“Many schools” includes religious communities beyond Buddhism. The king’s “exemptions” are tax exemptions. Vibhajyavāda here renders the Vibhajyavāda tradition (分别说系); it is distinct from the “Analysts” (分别论者) counted elsewhere in this essay. The Saṅgharāja institution and Saṅgha law refer to the later royal regulation discussed in Chapter 2, in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. They are not presented as institutions named in Aśoka’s inscriptions.

The perfect king on palm leaves as a retrospective model is expressly the author’s conjecture. The chapter specifies what would defeat it: narratives formed before the relevant need for a new dynasty’s support, or narratives whose contents did not fit monastic interests. Likewise, Kaniṣka’s council “repeats Pāṭaliputra” as a structural comparison proposed by the author, not as an event described that way in the historical sources. The contract and the final lesson summarize the chapter’s interpretation of the exchange between royal and monastic power.

The model is established, and its benefits and costs come from the same place. Essay 8 examines the contract's outcome in India; Essays 11 and 12 examine its Chinese and Tibetan variants. Here only the original is recorded. The next chapter first follows the furthest item dispatched under this contract. An island received Buddhism as a complete package and used it to accomplish something the homeland had never accomplished: freezing it.

References

References

  1. The schism edicts at Sarnath, Sanchi, and Kosam were cited in Essay 2, Chapter 3. The names and identification of the seven teachings recommended in the Bhabru/Bairāṭ edict remain disputed. For the tax reduction on the Lumbini pillar, see printed pp. 164–165 of the inscription volume. The original reads "Luṁmini-gāme ubalike kaṭe aṭha-bhāgiye cha"; the English translation reads "(He) made the village of Luṁmini free of taxes, and paying (only) an eighth share (of the produce)". The standard edition and English translation are E. Hultzsch, Inscriptions of Asoka (Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum I, Oxford, 1925; this book uses the Indological Book House reprint of 1969). The edict is commonly called the "Bhabra edict," but Hultzsch's introduction corrects the name. The findspot was Bairāṭ; the town from which the name derives is Bhabru, not Bhabra, twelve miles away. For a general account, see the Aśoka chapter in Étienne Lamotte, History of Indian Buddhism, trans. Sara Webb-Boin (Louvain: Peeters, 1988). ↩

  2. For the list of five kings, see E. Hultzsch, Inscriptions of Asoka (Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum, Vol. I, 1925), introduction, printed p. xxx. Rock Edict II, section A, reads "the Yona king Antiyoka (Antiyaka in the Girnar version) and the kings who are the neighbours of this Antiyoka"; Edict XIII, section Q, reads "the Yona king Antiyoka (Antiyoga in the Kalsi and Mansehra versions), and beyond him four kings, viz. Turamaya, Antekina, Maka, Alikasudara". Variant spellings are given together. For medicine beyond the borders, see the introduction to the same work, printed p. xlix: "Aśoka arranged for medical treatment of men and cattle not only in his own dominions, but among his borderers, and caused medicinal herbs, roots, and fruits to be cultivated". It also records the planting of trees and digging of wells along roads. The immediately following sentence on the same page supports the main text's statement that "the Dharma here is not necessarily a Buddhist monopoly": "There is nothing specifically Buddhistic in those benefactions to which the second rock-edict refers." The Greek-Aramaic bilingual edict at Kandahar was discovered only in 1958 and could not have appeared in Hultzsch's 1925 edition. The first report is Louis Robert, “L’inscription bilingue du Vieux-Kandahar (Afghanistan).” Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 102, no. 2 (1958): 189–191, presented at the meeting of June 20, 1958. The Greek side “se compose de quatorze lignes de grec, d’une excellente gravure…belle écriture hellénistique du IIIe siècle”; he dates it “exactement du milieu du IIIe siècle av. J.-C.” on the basis of Βασιλεùς Πιοδάσσης (Piyadassi) in lines 1 and 2. The Aramaic side was then entrusted to André Dupont-Sommer. The full critical edition appeared in Journal Asiatique 246 (1958); this book has not checked against that source. Robert's wording about the edict's contents requires attention. He calls the inscription “ces phrases de morale bouddhique que le roi Asoka lui-même fit graver pour les Grecs” (printed p. 191), a different emphasis from the main text's "not necessarily a Buddhist monopoly." His piece was, however, an oral report made just after the discovery, not a specialized study of the reading. On this point, the critical edition must remain the authority. ↩

  3. The nine missions appear in Chapter 12 of the Mahāvaṃsa and the Samantapāsādikā. Inscriptions on reliquaries from Sanchi Stūpa 2 and Sonārī name teachers of the Himalayan line who match the nine-mission list. These are the strongest corroboration of the mission narrative. For publication of the reliquaries, see A. Cunningham, The Bhilsa Topes (London, 1854); for a modern reassessment, see Michael Willis, "Buddhist Saints in Ancient Vedisa," JRAS 11.2 (2001). Willis's article is a rebuttal of the skepticism about the Third Council's missions found in Lamotte, Histoire du Bouddhisme Indien, p. 334, and Frauwallner, The Earliest Vinaya, p. 18. He says this account "does violence to the sources" and is inconsistent with the Sonārī inscriptions. The injunction to teach, "Let no two travel the same road," appears in the sections after the first turning of the Dharma wheel in the Mahāvagga of the Pāli Vinaya. ↩

  4. For Devānampiya Tissa's receipt of consecration gifts from Aśoka, his second coronation, and their shared royal title "Beloved of the Gods," see Chapter 11 of the Mahāvaṃsa. For Saṅghamittā and the Bodhi branch, see the relevant chapters of the Mahāvaṃsa and Volume 1, Essay 9, Chapter 1. Lamotte, History of Indian Buddhism, printed p. 227 (verified at two points), identifies the five Hellenistic rulers named in Edict XIII individually. Amtiyoga is Antiochus II of Syria (261–246 BCE); the four kings beyond him are Turamaya, Ptolemy II of Egypt (285–247 BCE); Amtekin, Antigonus II of Macedonia (276–239 BCE); Maga, Magas of Cyrene (died 258 BCE); and Alikasudara, Alexander of Epirus (272–256 BCE). As for whether the sources from the Hellenistic states contain traces of Dharma envoys, this book has not verified a recheckable catalog or specialized study of those sources. The point is recorded here only as a doubt. To establish the silence of a body of texts, one must first inventory it. This book has not done so. ↩

  5. The story of Puṣyamitra's (弗沙蜜多罗, also 补砂密多罗) persecution of Buddhism appears in fascicle 3 of the Life of Aśoka, the Śāriputraparipṛcchā, and other sources. Its historicity has long been disputed. This volume treats it as an archive of fear and does not accept it as historical fact. His two horse sacrifices are attested in the Dhanadeva inscription at Ayodhyā and a contemporary sentence in Patañjali's Mahābhāṣya (iha puṣyamitraṃ yājayāmaḥ, "we are performing a sacrifice for Puṣyamitra"). ↩

  6. For the Vibhajjavāda line, the Pāṭaliputra council, and Mahinda's dispatch, see the Mahāvaṃsa and the Samantapāsādikā, already cited in this essay and Essay 2. Southern texts call those expelled non-Buddhists; the reading in terms of conflict between schools appears in modern scholarship (Lamotte, History of Indian Buddhism, 1988; Erich Frauwallner, The Earliest Vinaya and the Beginnings of Buddhist Literature, Rome: IsMEO, 1956; for the schools' geography, see also André Bareau, Les sectes bouddhiques du Petit Véhicule, Saigon: EFEO, 1955). These three authors must each be cited for what their work supplies, not invoked indiscriminately. Frauwallner explicitly says on printed p. 5 that schools arose from doctrine, not Vinaya: "The rise of the schools, as reflected in those accounts, is due to differences of opinion on points of dogma. Discussions on the Vinaya are seldom heard of, play a role of some import only in the so-called second council of Vaisali; and there they do not lead to a split into different schools." The point actually relevant to this note appears on printed p. 17, where the two accounts of the missions differ: "the data of the Singhalese chronicles are uncertain on this point. The account of the missions … gives the merit of the conversion of Ceylon to Tissa Moggaliputta, but the native tradition attributes it to the initiative of Asoka." Chapter 1 of Bareau's book tabulates classifications by geography and school affiliation and can be used to check the schools' geography. He does not, however, connect those expelled from Pāṭaliputra with that geographical distribution. This connection is this volume's inference. For Kaniṣka's council and the Mahāvibhāṣā, see Volume 1, Essay 3. Comparing them to a replay of the Pāṭaliputra model is this book's structural comparison; none of the works cited above makes that claim. For Sasaki Shizuka's account of the redefinition of schism, see the next note. ↩

  7. For Sasaki Shizuka's account of the redefinition of schism, see Sasaki Shizuka 佐々木閑, "A Basic Approach for Research on the Origins of Mahāyāna Buddhism." Acta Asiatica 96 (2009): 25–46. Section 4, "A Change in the Definition of Saṅghabheda" (printed pp. 32–33), explains that the Vinaya originally defined schism as advocating a different view and gathering people to form a separate monastic community: "But later, in order to unify Buddhist communities in a state of saṅghabheda, the definition of saṅghabheda was altered during the reign of King Aśoka, and if members of the same monastic community split into two groups and performed commutative rituals such as the poṣadha separately, this was now deemed to constitute saṅghabheda". The consequence (printed p. 33) was that "Buddhism subsequently turned into a religion that sanctioned any doctrine whatsoever as long as people participated in the same group rituals"; Mahāyāna teachings could then emerge simultaneously in different places "from within Hīnayāna Buddhism". Sasaki himself treats this as a hypothesis, writing "if one assumes that as a result of this incident…". This volume accordingly treats it as one account among others. His detailed treatment appears in インド仏教変移論：なぜ仏教は多様化したのか (Tokyo: 大蔵出版, 2000, pp. 57–123) and the English series "Buddhist Sects in the Aśoka Period" (Bukkyō Kenkyū 18–28, 1989–1999, eight articles). Neither original has been directly checked. There are also objections concerning details of the Vinaya text. 小南薫, 〈根本説一切有部律"破僧事"に見られる破僧定義〉 (印度學佛敎學硏究 71, no. 2, 2023, pp. 47–50), collates the Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese versions. The article points out that Sasaki (2000) says the Saṅghabhedavastu establishes only a definition of cakrabheda, whereas the passage actually gives a karmabheda-type definition and can hardly be treated as a later addition. This objection concerns Sasaki's reading of one passage in one Vinaya. In the same 2009 issue, see also Shimoda Masahiro 下田正弘, "The State of Research on Mahāyāna Buddhism: The Mahāyāna as Seen in Developments in the Study of Mahāyāna Sūtras." Acta Asiatica 96 (2009): 1–23. On printed pp. 15–16, Shimoda summarizes Sasaki's four points: there are two kinds of schism; the latter permits people with different views to live in one community; the Vinaya definition changed from the former to the latter; and this change shows Aśoka's intervention. He says Sasaki further infers that the change made the emergence of Mahāyāna possible. He then records that "Some significant doubts have been cast on this understanding of Sasaki's by Lee Jarang" (李慈郞, 2000, on the Kauśāmbī Skandhaka and nānāsaṃvāsaka), and that "there is still room for further investigation of this issue". On the basis of his own work on the Mahāparinirvāṇa-sūtra, however, Shimoda allows that Sasaki "deserves credit for having elucidated in institutional terms on the basis of the Vinaya the circumstances in which the Mahāyāna originated in the existing monastic community". The theory thus receives qualified approval in Japanese scholarship; it is not a settled conclusion. This volume's treatment of it as one account among others is consistent with that assessment. ↩