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An Apocryphal Early Life

WE DON’T KNOW EXACTLY WHEN ASHOKA WAS BORN. That he was born sometime in the cusp of the fourth and third century BCE (c. 304 BCE) is certain, but the particular day, month, and year is not known. Very few ancient writers share our modern obsession with recording such events with calendrical exactness, and certainly Ashoka’s scribes cannot be counted in this category. Date precision in relation to an individual life came into existence much after Ashoka’s time, usually when a court chronicler penned the biography of a ruler-patron. Harshavardhana, who ruled from Kanauj in North India nearly 900 years after Ashoka, was one such king whose court poet, Bana, made him the central character in a historical story woven out of the actual events of his reign. There, the month of Harsha’s conception, along with his date of birth, were recorded, as also the fact that he was born just after ‘the twilight time’.1 Such precision grows commoner in medieval India, when accounts authorized by powerful emperors come frequently to be composed during their own lifetime. Akbar commissioned his court historian, Abu’l Fazl, to write what became the Akbar Nama, whose eponymous hero is recorded as having been born in Sindh, complete with all manner of extraordinary phenomena that heralded his arrival in the sixteenth century, including a strange light perceptible on the brows of his mother when she was pregnant with him.2
Ancient India’s royal biographical tradition begins several centuries after Ashoka, which is why we merely know that his father Bindusara ruled from roughly 297 till 273 BCE, and that his grandfather Chandragupta’s regnal dates are probably 321–297 BCE. The likely year of Ashoka’s birth is surmised by working backwards from the time when he was anointed emperor, for which we have a reasonably accurate date. This accuracy for his ascension is because his years as emperor have been synchronized with the reigns of contemporary rulers in Asia and beyond: their dates are fairly certain, and several of them are mentioned by name in Ashoka’s inscriptions, including Antiochus II Theos of the Seleucid kingdom, Ptolemy II Philadelphus of Egypt, Antigonus II Gonatas of Macedon, Magas of Cyrene, and Alexander of Epirus (or Corinth).3 These kings and the context in which they are alluded to in Ashoka’s epigraphs will be elaborated later; for the present it suffices that arriving at an accurate chronology for Ashoka has involved looking at overlaps in the chronology of these kings and the inscriptions in which they figure.
The emperor’s consecration is likely to have taken place around 269/268 BCE.4 As with several other kings in ancient India whose lives were described in regnal years, Ashoka anchored the various happenings in his reign in relation to the year of his consecration.5 He is, in fact, the earliest known monarch of ancient India to have recorded events from the time when he was anointed. Many rulers, for centuries afterwards, such as the Satavahanas of western India, the Palas in the east, and the Cholas in peninsular India, would continue with this practice of recording events in relation to the time elapsed since the consecration of the king in question.6 But there were other monarchs who, by the first century BCE, had begun to indicate events in terms of a more continuous era, where the continuity was reckoned in relation to the reign of a given king by his successors (and which could continue even after that dynasty had ceased to exist).7 Inscriptions of the time of the Gupta line of rulers were frequently in this format: the Sarnath epigraph is dated to the Gupta year 154 (‘a century of years increased by fifty-four’), this being the time of Kumaragupta II, with the year possibly suggesting that the era originated with the first ‘Maharajadhiraja’ of the dynasty, Chandragupta I.8 Many rulers in their epigraphs provide dates wholly in relation to the starting year of their reign, with the additional provision of a second date which measures time over a relatively longer duration, often calculated according to a continuous political era. So, had Ashoka used a system of reckoning in this form, both regnal and dynastic, the time that elapsed between the accession of his grandfather Chandragupta and Ashoka’s own consecration may well have been precisely known.
Ashoka’s ‘dates’ figure in the astonishing number of his imperial texts that were inscribed on stone, rock faces, and pillars. On them the emperor offered all kinds of information, ranging from what was cooked in the royal kitchen to his distaste for inane social ceremonies. The epigraphs are frequently long, and the insights that they provide about his later life, his aspirations, and those of his administration and his subjects, are often communications in the first person: the emperor is addressing us. This in part is what has raised expectations among historians of this stoneware yielding something about Ashoka’s early life. These expectations have been dashed. There is not even passing mention of any milestones relating to Ashoka’s princely years; he does not speak of his ancestors, nor even of his own parents.9 Epigraphs in later centuries are known to have expansively described the lineages of rulers who had had royal messages recorded. Even the lineages of previous and present queen-consorts sometimes appear, alongside details of victories in battle, which are often attributed by the kings to the gods and goddesses that they worshipped. Such inscriptions occasionally mention the life of the royal protagonist before he became king. This is so in the first century BCE Hathigumpha epigraph of Kharavela, the ruler of Kalinga who led successful campaigns against Magadha, Anga, and the Tamil region. There, an entire verse is devoted to the prince’s training and learning: ‘for fifteen years, with a body ruddy and handsome were played youthsome sports; after that (by him who) had mastered (royal) correspondence, currency, finance, civil and religious laws (and) who had become well-versed in all (branches) of learning, for nine years (the office of) Yuvaraja (heir apparent) was administered.’10
Ashoka’s reticence over his personal affairs is stark. This, as we shall see, may well be on account of events specific to his early life, as also because by the time the epigraphs were composed he had possibly developed an aversion for social ceremonies performed on occasions—he specifies these—such as the birth of a son, or the marriage of an offspring.11 There is also the fact that at the time he began the practice of inscribing edicts on stone surfaces, Ashoka had no traditional template before him. He does not appear to follow the provisions of the manual of statecraft, the Arthashastra, which tells the scribe that when the commands of the king are set down there should be ‘a courteous mention of the country, the sovereignty, the family and the name’ of the king.12 Or else, perhaps deliberately, he chose not to follow the prescribed format. Instead of mentioning his family and genealogy—of immense interest to us but not it seems to him—he records only what was of central importance to him. His official consecration ceremony (or ‘abhisheka’) seems to have been important to him, suggesting that the wielding of power and the consequent ability to mould a population were what mattered. Events in the life of a monarch, and not those prior to his becoming a ruler, were significant. Where he was taking himself and his people mattered; where he came from did not.
If Ashoka did not care to create his own version of the events of his princely life, there is no independent contemporary account of it either. We hear of his early life only in legends so separated from his time—by hundreds of years—that it seems a primary necessity in any biographical account to discount their historical value. These are all texts that create stories about Ashoka’s birth and early years, and in doing so show something of how he came to be represented after his death. What makes these stories useful despite the concoction is that they frequently include plausible historical detail about Ashokan times. Using the threads that make up the tapestry of such legends, one may at least begin to understand the contexts and circumstances in which the man was born.
The strongest thread to emerge from the lore is that Ashoka’s ‘coming’ as emperor of India was predicted. It was first predicted during one of Ashoka’s own earlier lives. The ‘prophet’ who foretold it all was an ascetic. This is unsurprising: ancient India, much like modern India, was awash in holy men claiming clairvoyance. But this specific sage was not your average run-of-the-mill soothsayer: he was the greatest of all ancient ascetics, Gautama Buddha himself.13 While the Buddha lived much of his life in the sixth century BCE whereas Ashoka, as the third emperor of the Maurya dynasty, belonged to the third, within sacred biographies of the Buddhist tradition chronological fluidity appears to have been fairly common.14 Within this textual mode biographies, especially those depicting the Buddha, characteristically recount a past life before moving into a later rebirth or rebirths, or moving from the present to the past. In the instance at hand, a Buddhist emperor is incorporated into this tradition, making Ashoka a prediction subsequent to the Buddha. His coming, by being foretold by the Buddha himself, conjoins the two, making them seem inseparable from each other. Such insertion via legend of an earlier life of the king allows the introduction of a standard motif used in the ancient world—predisposing an audience to feel awed at the arrival of a regal saviour long awaited. Jesus was foretold, the Buddha was foretold, Moses was foretold. In those times it almost seems that if you hadn’t been foretold you were not likely to be a sufficiently important religious figure or kingly personage. The telling of the story of the Buddha’s prophecy about Ashoka’s future arrival is an instance of adroit religious narration.
The story is first told in the Ashokavadana, which is a Sanskrit version of the life of Ashoka (in the form of a legend) written in the second century CE.15 ‘Avadana’ means a noteworthy deed that shows the ways in which the actions of one’s existence are linked with those of former or future lives.16 In this class of literature, as is evident from the Ashokavadana, the former and the ‘real’ lives of the ‘greats’ within Buddhism are frequently connected in order to milk various morals from the narrative. This is very much in the tradition of Buddhist sacred biographies, where the same sort of incident happens again and again under changed circumstances and different conditions,17 the repetition serving as the narrative trope that induces the religious feeling of an approaching marvel—a variety of The Chronicle of a Birth Foretold.
The person of the Buddha is, in this tradition, instrumental in every story where glimmerings of future greatness are first revealed.18 Here, the Buddha is shown as having encountered an earlier avatara of Ashoka in the city of Rajagriha. Ashoka was, when thus encountered, a young boy, Jaya by name, who lived in this city, Rajagriha, which the sage had entered seeking alms. Walking along Rajagriha’s main thoroughfare, the Buddha saw two young boys playing in the dirt. One of them, Jaya, on seeing the Buddha, decided to place a handful of dirt in his begging bowl. Typically, in such a story, the act of offering is accompanied by the formulation of a wish or statement of intent about the merit to be gained by the act. Jaya’s statement is straightforward enough. By the good merit he might earn, he said, ‘I would become king and, after placing the earth under a single umbrella of sovereignty, I would pay homage to the blessed Buddha.’ Children usually have more modest aspirations but Jaya was no ordinary child. The Buddha certainly believed so, as also that Jaya had the character and the resolve to achieve what he wanted. As he predicted, ‘the desired fruit would be obtained because of his field of merit.’ He therefore received the ‘proffered dirt’, and thus ‘the seed of merit that was to ripen into Ashoka’s kingship was planted.’ Soon thereafter the Buddha predicted to his disciple Ananda that a hundred years after his death ‘that boy will become a king named Ashoka in the city of Pataliputra. He will be a righteous dharmaraja, a chakravartin who rules over one of the four continents, and he will distribute my relics far and wide and build the eighty-four thousand dharmarajikas.’19
Legends, in order to sound plausible, create credible contexts for the stories they recount. This legend certainly got the historical trajectory of the capitals of Magadha right. In the time of the Buddha, the centre of Magadhan royal authority was indeed Rajagriha, while by the third century BCE, when Ashoka became emperor, it had long ceased to be so. By then, Pataliputra had become the capital city. In the next chapter, what we know of the precincts of Pataliputra and its visible remains will be elucidated. Here, it is enough to say that the veracity of such historical details surely endows an authenticity to the text’s description of those centuries. This cannot be said about all aspects of the text, as, for instance, its sense of chronology. The statement that Ashoka lived about a hundred years after the death of the Buddha is incorrect even in terms of the text’s own pronouncement that eleven generations of kings separated Bimbisara, who was the king of Magadha in the time of the Buddha, from Ashoka. Apparently, ‘one hundred years’ was only a way of suggesting that the era of Ashoka was much after the time of the Buddha.20
But what about the story itself? For those readers who are interested in the telling of a good story, the Avadana account may leave them feeling shortchanged. This is because the future of Ashoka is foretold very early in the tale. Generally speaking, in the crafting of a biography, even while it is assumed that the reader is aware of the broad contours of the life of the personage who forms its subject, the story is told in a way that ensures there is anticipation, suspense, and drama. In this ancient saga around a historical life it is these elements which are in danger of being compromised—because of the prophecy. Very early on, this prophecy is made and an important intention in the narrative that follows is to show how it will be fulfilled.
But did the ancients see the pronouncing of a prophecy in the way that we do? Prophecy, as a narrative technique, was employed by the epic poets in Greece. There, such prophecies, by anticipating what would befall the protagonist, apparently ensured that those following the narration did so with heightened interest. The epi...