Ashoka and the Politics of Moral Governance

Posted on July 28, 2020 Updated on July 28, 2020

When the Emperor Bindusara died in 272 BCE, he was succeeded by his young son, Ashoka the Great (304-232 BCE), who infamously became an ambitious and aggressive monarch that crushed revolts and conquered nearby city-states. On accession to the Mauryan throne, Ashoka inherited both the imperial territory that extended from Assam in the East to Balochistan in the West, and the expansionist policies of his grandfather and founder of the dynasty, Chandragupta Maurya. Ashoka brought the empire to its apogee, conquering the land of the Kalingas in the Southeast (modern-day Orissa), and politically uniting the entire Indian subcontinent for the first time in history (Strong, 1989). Historical evidence consisting of the thirty-four edicts written by Ashoka do not reveal the motivation for the Mauryan empire engaging in warfare against the Kalingas, but the edicts do show that the Maurya victory was overwhelming and brutal:

“One hundred and fifty thousand persons were…carried away captive, one hundred thousand were…slain, and many times that number died…[I]f the hundredth part or the thousandth part were now to suffer the same fate, it would be a matter of regret.”

(Edict XIII, circa 257 BCE.)

The edicts, which were chiselled on hundreds of rock surfaces and pillars throughout the Indian subcontinent, were inscribed in India’s first written script, Ashoka Brahmi. Apart from Ashoka’s own edicts, other sources depict the emperor in his early years of rule as harsh and violent. For instance, the Sanskrit Divyāvadāna describes Ashoka as an ugly, grotesque leader that turned the Mauryan kingdom into a place of terror and oppression. It claims that Ashoka beheaded 500 of his ministers by sword and burned 500 court ladies to death. The Chinese Aśokāvadāna reinforces the wickedness of Ashoka’s character, but, as Guruge (1994) notes, there is a tendency among Buddhist writers to make Ashoka’s character out to be all the more malevolent in his early years of rule in order to show the dramatic change in his character after he converted to Buddhism.

The details around Ashoka’s conversion to Buddhism are unclear. For the most part, sources tend to skip over the conversion process and emphasise the motivations for Ashoka’s change in character. The story goes that after witnessing the death and destruction that resulted from the Kalinga war, Ashoka was filled with “profound sorrow and regret” (Edict XIII). The lack of elations in the Edicts over the Kalinga defeat is interpreted by Draper (1995) to indicate a silent moral premise that all suffering and destruction of life, whether human or animal, is regrettable and to be avoided. Thus, the deep pain that came from witnessing the killing, dying and deportation of the conquered city caused Ashoka to renounce military conquest and all other forms of violence. This conversion story tends to follow the popular notion of psychological change as being cause by a particular occurrence in a person’s life, for instance, the sight of the sick, the old, the dead, and the ascetic, which caused Siddhartha Buddha to change and renounce his princely life. However, as James M. Macphail, author of the 1928 book Ashoka states:

“It is not easy to understand why Ashoka, the head of a great military empire that had been acquired in no very remote time by conquest, should have been so deeply affected and conscience stricken by his experience of what were in those days familiar horrors of war. There must surely have been some preparation for so great a change. Possibly the teaching of the followers of Gautama had impressed him more than he himself realized, and the experience of actual bloodshed on a large scale, merely to gratify ambition and enrich the State, served to crystallize into convictions impressions that had been slowly forming in his mind.”

In other words, Ashoka was probably exposed to Buddhist teachings before the Kalinga war, and the death and destruction that occurred during the military conquest would have prompted the Emperor to change his foreign policy from dig-vijaya or imperialist expansion to dharmavijaya, conquest through righteousness. In Ashoka’s own description of this transition, he states:

Now that the Kalingas have been conquered, the empire shall be devoted to the intense practice of the Dharma, especially among the people. This is because the Kingdom regrets having conquered the Kalinga territory (paraphrased).  

The syntactical form of this description, starting with “now that” or when such a thing has been done, implies that the annexation of Kalinga was a pre-requisite that had to be fulfilled before Ashoka could politically adopt Buddhism and the Dharma (Guruge, 1994). It is unclear whether this was because of Ashoka’s royal duties, the Mauryan tradition to conquer the furthermost lands, or because of national security reasons, but it seems that Ashoka strategically used the death and destruction of Kalinga to upset the status quo just enough to fundamentally redirect Mauryan foreign policy. It can be assumed that this would have been a challenging shift since a lot of power and influence lay in the hands of the Brahman priesthood, who were at the top of the Dharma-sanctioned caste pyramid and who served as Ashoka’s ministers and advisors. One of the first changes that Ashoka enacted was changing the traditional Brahman offerings and ceremonies, which he considered to be ostentatious and unprofitable. In the ninth edict, Ashoka wrote that “Now ceremonies should certainly be performed. But these bear little fruit. That, however, is productive of great fruit which is connected with Dharma.” In his opposition to animal slaughter and the killing and consumption of animals in the royal kitchens, Ashoka again clashed with Brahman ritual as he sought to replace these ceremonies with peaceful “spiritual revival” public events (Albinski, 1958).

Other changes that Ashoka decreed to establish a moral policy included, ordering banyan and mango trees to be planted around the imperial territory; building rest houses and ordering that wells be built every half-mile along the roads so that humans and animals have access to hydration; building medical facilities for humans and animals; and a very Confucian edict was ordering that people obey their parents, are generous towards priests and ascetics and practice frugality in their spending. All up, manpower was doubled to provide the necessary services to the needy, and major internal political reform took place when Ashoka entrusted officials with moral and political functions by commissioning officers to work for the welfare and happiness of the poor and aged.

Another controversial edict ordered by Ashoka was that people should honour men of all faiths. This message was likely perceived as a threat the Brahmanical priests and religious pundits who believed they alone had the authority to dictate what religious rules people should follow. Brahmanical hostility towards Ashoka came in the form of historical silence. As Allen (2012) notes, Emperor Ashoka was “all but erased from India’s history…by promoting Buddhist heresay throughout the land, Ashoka directly challenged the caste-based authority of the Brahman order. Indeed, by the post-Mauryan period Brahmanical intolerance of other religions was so prevalent that in the Mahabhashya of Patanjali, it states that Brahmans and Shramans (which include Jains, Buddhists and others) are ‘eternal enemies’ like the snake and the mongoose (Jha, 2016, p. 5). Despite the setback of Brahmanical opposition, Ashoka kept Maurya’s large and powerful army to maintain public order and expanded friendly relations with states across Asia and Europe through Buddhist missionary campaigns. As well as constructing stupas, Buddhist religious structures, across the empire, Ashoka delegated moral ministers to remote lands to promote his own version of “spiritual imperialism” or modern-day soft power.

According to scholars who traced the decline and fall of the Mauryan Empire, it was not long after Ashoka’s death that the political and religious edifices were weakened and eventually replaced since Ashoka’s rule was popularly interpreted as anti-Brahmanical. Other factors that contributed to the decline of the Maurya range from economic upheaval to the breakdown of expansive bureaucracy created by Ashoka, and decentralization of authority that is said to have brought about corrupt and wicked officials (Guruge, 1994). Ashoka’s moral principles of respecting all living beings and recognising different kinds of vulnerabilities and dependencies is important to note and it can be compared to the Confucian understanding of individuals existing in social relationships of various obligations towards parents, friends, acquaintances, and even towards slaves and servants. Ashoka argued that goodness cannot be done alone or by one without ethical discipline and care must be taken to avoid injustices and maintain control over oneself (Kachru, 2020). Such a communal approach to morality was a strategic way to unite a large and diverse empire, while slowly limiting the overwhelming power and influence of the Brahmanical elite. Although Ashoka’s mandates did not last long after his passing, Ashokan rule represents the pinnacle of ethical governance in India’s political history and should not be forgotten.