Ashoka was the grandson of Candragupta Maurya. He violently seized the throne of Magadha in 273 BCE, and eventually extended some kind of Mauryan overlordship to most of India. He also decisively defeated Greek attempts to regain their colonies in the northwestern territories. After a brutal campaign against Kalinga (Orissa and northern Andhra), Ashoka became a Buddhist in 262 BCE and from that time on exercised a decisive influence on Buddhist history by extending his powerful patronage to its teachings, renewing its institutional structures and supporting its spread.
The Buddha himself had commanded that his remains be cremated, and a stupa be erected over them. In fact his cremated remains were divided into eight parts and given to eight rival claimants in authority at the following towns and cities on the territory that was to become the Mauryan state of Magadha: to Ajatasattu at Rajagrha, the Licchavis at Vesali, the Sakyas (the Buddha’s own clan) at Kapilavasthu, the Bulis at Allakappa, the Kolis at Ramagama, a Brahman at Vethadipa, the Mallas at Pava, and the Mallas at Kusinagara. The Brahmin, Drona, who divided the corporeal remains kept the urn and the Moriyas at Pipphalivana who arrived late on the cremation site received some ashes from the funeral pyre. All of these objects were treated as sacred relics over which stupa mounds were heaped up. The multiplicity of claimants to the Buddha’s remains in c. 380 BCE throws light on how weak and localized power was on Magadha territory at the time of the Buddha’s death. Only some fifty years later this situation began to change under Candragupta with the creation of the Mauryan state, while just over a century later, Ashoka, as the unchallenged ruler of the most powerful state in India, exercised an undisputed right to open up the stupas containing the Buddha’s cremated remains and make further distributions of his relics.
At Kusinagara - the place where the Buddha died - a huge stupa called the Cremation Stupa still exists and, if the attribution is correct, it may be the earliest surviving Buddhist monument. While it is extremely likely that it has been enlarged and rebuilt many times - a common occurrence in Buddhism - it may indeed contain a mud or mud-brick core with relics dating back to the time just after the Buddha’s death. Ashoka’s purpose in opening the original stupas was to subdivide the relics and distribute them as sacred objects in conversion missions to the regions of his empire, as well as to those outside it. Ashoka’s stone inscriptions record missions to the Middle East, Egypt, and Macedonia, as well as to Sri Lanka and Suvannab-humi (probably the Mon kingdoms of Lower Burma). Ashokan-era conversions to Buddhism at the last two are supported by local chronicles and legends but not as yet by firm archaeological evidence.
The monuments of Ashoka’s reign associated with Buddhism fall into the following categories: about twenty magnificent stone pillars and pillar fragments (out of some forty mentioned in texts); his imperial edicts inscribed on these pillars, on caves, rock shelters and rock faces; a flat stone throne base now at Bodh Gaya; the mud core of a stupa at Vesali containing a reliquary; the core of the Dharmarajika stupa at Sarnath, and possibly some small votive stupas at Lumbini. In addition there are fragmentary structural remains - fortifications and other non-religious monumental remains-at Pataliputra (Candragupta’s capital), Rajagrha (Ashoka’s capital), Ganwaria, Sonkh, and Sravasti that are Mauryan (some possibly pre-Ashokan) in origin but not directly related to Buddhism.
Many of Ashoka’s stone pillars were provided with lotus and animal capitals which contributed enduring symbols to the iconography of early Buddhism: the lion, bull, elephant, deer, lotus, wheel, and the pillar itself. If, as seems likely, this last represented a link between the realms of the Earth and the sky, it prefigured the yasti pole going from the pinnacle of the stupa in the northern Indian and Nepalese traditions, through its core with its base resting on the relic chamber. A distinguishing characteristic of Mauryan stone artifacts is that the stone has been brought to a fine polish that still survives. The very concept of erecting imperial pillars and inscribing imperial edicts on stone, the format and style employed in these inscriptions, the technique of stone polishing, as well as some of the sculptural styles (especially in the lions) all appear to be practices of the Achaemenid empire adopted and thoroughly assimilated by the Mauryan rulers. From this time onwards, these symbols entered the mainstream of Indian Buddhist art.
As a powerful ruler, Ashoka would certainly have patronized the other religions practiced within his empire, but his own statements in the edicts reveal that his commitment to Buddhism was profound. During the some hundred years that elapsed between the Buddha’s death and Ashoka’s conversion, Buddhism was merely one of several loosely structured ascetic movements in the Magadha area. Internal dissensions arose quite quickly which the Second Buddhist Council, held in this interval, failed to resolve. Ashoka summoned the Third Buddhist Council (c. 250 BCE) which had a lasting impact on the development of the religion. While it is believed that the vinaya rules governing the structure and life of the monkhood (the sangha) were laid down by the Buddha, it may well be that the clear codification of the vinaya, its systematic adoption and, perhaps most significant, the creation of disciplinary procedures within the sangha to enforce it were the result of the work of the Third Buddhist Council. A codification of generally accepted versions of the Discourses of the Buddha began, which were then rigorously committed to memory. Numbers play a recurring role in this core of early Buddhist texts. Concepts, objectives, rules, attributes, people, spirits, actions, and heavens are listed in this way. Numbers are a mnemonic device which effectively supported the accuracy of the oral tradition. As we shall see below, Pali texts inscribed on gold and deposited in a relic chamber in Burma in c. the fifth century CE do not differ significantly from those transmitted orally and collected in Sri Lanka in the nineteenth century by the English founding members of the Pali Text Society.
After the Third Buddhist Council but possibly also before, it became obligatory for monks to be resident in one place at least during the rainy season every year and, in practice, communities of monks who were largely sedentary can be traced in the rock shelters and cave shrines of the Vidisha area from the second century BCE and perhaps from the time of Ashoka himself. Similar claims have been made on the basis of the palaeography of very early Buddhist inscriptions on the drip ledges of monastic cave sites in northern Sri Lanka. Thus the three jewels of Buddhism - Buddha, dhamma, sangha - emerged as profoundly renewed and mutually reinforcing influences in Indian society from the third century BCE as a result of the powerful patronage of the Emperor Ashoka and the activities of the Third Buddhist Council. In particular it seems that the strong, self-regulating structures of the sangha became the central prop to the effective preservation and propagation of the meaning of the Buddha and his dhamma. The further history of Buddhism inside and outside India is ineluctably bound up with the forms and fortunes of the sangha in the various sects of Buddhism that emerged after the first century BCE. In turn, these relied on the patronage of rulers and the devoted support of the people.
World History
