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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 March 2011
There is a certain rock edict of Aśōka, regarding the interpretation and application of which no final result has as yet been arrived at. That this has been the case, is due chiefly to an unfortunate initial mistake, which introduced a supposed word, taken to mean “two and a half,” into the reading of a passage of primary importance which mentions a certain period of years. It was subsequently fully admitted that a misreading had been made. But the effect of that misreading remained. And, like similar mistakes in other matters, the initial mistake made here left an influence which neither the scholar who made it, nor subsequent inquirers, could shake off.
page 5 note 1 It has not always been recognised that this precept is complete as given in translation above. But, that that is distinctly marked by the word ti, = iti, which stands in four of the versions in which the passage is extant, has been pointed out by Dr. Bühler in El, iii, p. 142, 8.
page 5 note 2 We need not trouble ourselves on this occasion with the exact analysis and disposal of the word sa-paṁnālāti, ‘fifty-six.’
page 6 note 1 For instance, in the Suttanipāta, verse 31, “be thou our Teacher, O great Sage!,” verse 545, “thou art Buddha, thou art the Teacher” (ed. Fausboll, pp. 5, 98), and in the Dīpavaṁsa, 1, 17, 35; 2, 20 (ed. Oldenberg, pp. 14, 16, 22), and in the Mahāvaṁsa (Turnour, p. 3, line 12, p. 4, line 13, p. 7, line 6).
page 7 note 1 I would like to suggest to certain European scholars that, instead of citing Sir A. Cunningham's volume on the records of Aśōka, and my own volume on the records of the Early (or Imperial) Gupta Kings and their Successors, as “CII, vol. I,” and “CII, vol. III,” meaning thereby vols. I, and III, of the “Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum,”— a method of referring to them which does not indicate much, if anything, of value,— it would be more useful to cite them, by distinctive titles, as Inscriptions of Aśōka (or Asōka Inscriptions) and Gupta Inscriptions, or as Insers. of Aśōka (or Aśoka Insers.) and Gupta Insers, or, if an absolute abbreviation is desired, as “C.AI,” and “F. G I.” These two works are the first and third volumes, nominally, of a series which has never gone any further, and, it is feared, is not likely to do so. And it has been a matter for regret that they were ever numbered as volumes of such a series. Even the intended second volume of that inchoate series has never appeared, though, it is believed, the preparation of it had been undertaken by someone before the time when the preparation of the volume on the Gupta Inscriptions devolved upon me as Epigraphist to the Government of India, 1883 to 1886. It was contemplated that that second volume should contain the “Inscriptions of the Indo-Scythians, and of the Satraps of Surashtra” (see Insers. of Aśōka, Preface, p. 1). It was understood by me that all the materials for it, then known, had been collected; and, in fact, most of the intended Plates seem to have been actually printed off (see JRAS, 1894, p. 175). And consequently, having plenty of travelling and other work to do in connection with my own volume when I was in Northern India, I did not lay myself out to obtain fresh ink-impressions and estampages of the records of the other series, though I did secure a few such materials, in the cases both of them and of the Asōka records, as opportunity served. I have often, since then, regretted the omission; especially because a few of the materials then extant do not now exist, except at the bottom of the sea, in the wreck of the P. and O. steamship “Indus,” on the north-east coast of Ceylon (see ibid).
page 8 note 1 Being not acquainted with German, for my knowledge of the exact purport of this article by Professor H. Oldenberg, referred to again further on in connection with the other extract with which we have to deal, I am indebted to Mr. Thomas, who has very kindly supplied me with a translation of it.
page 12 note 1 The metre is faulty in this pāda. Pāli authors, however, seem to have never troubled themselves about irregularities of metre.
page 13 note 1 I may now add, in revising the proofs of my article, another literary instance which, also, has come to my notice casually. It is a passage in a Jain paṭṭāvali, which places the destruction of Valabhī and other occurrences such and such numbers (of years) after the death of Mahāvīra-Vardhamāna by the words:— śrī-Vīrāt 845 Valabhī-bhaṅgaḥ 826 kvachit 886 brahmadvīpikāḥ 882 chaityasthitiḥ; see IA, xi, 1882, p. 252 b.
page 14 note 1 The validity of my general argument would not be destroyed, even if hereafter there should be established something which, I believe, is held to have been demolished long ago; namely, that Buddha and Vardhamāna were originally one and the same person, and were differentiated by the divergence of rival sects, with the inevitable oriental concomitant of the invention of separative details of the most circumstantial kind, perhaps before, perhaps only after, the time of Aśōka. However, I do not make any assertion in that direction; I have not studied the point. I only hint at a possibility, which must not be altogether ignored even now.
page 14 note 1 I refer to one or other of two records edited by me in Gupta Inscriptions, 1888, No. 71, p. 274, and No. 72, p. 278 (see also IA, xv, 1886, pp. 356, 359). The inscription No. 71 is dated in the year 269, in the month Chaitia, it mentions, in a line of Buddhist disciples of Lankā (Ceylon), Bhava, Rāhula, Upase˜na (I.), Mahānāman (I), Upasēna (II), and Mahānāman (II.), a resident of Āmradvīpa, and born in the island of Lankā, and it records that, in the specified year, the second Mahānāman founded a Buddhist temple or monastery at the Bōdhimanda, that is at Bōdh-Gayā. The inscription No. 72 is not dated, it records the presentation of a Buddhist image by the Sthaina Mahānāman, a resident of Āmradvīpa.
When I edited these records, I took the Sthavin a Mahānāman of the inscription No. 72 to be identical with the second Mahnaman of No. 71. I interpreted the date in No. 71, the year 269, the month Chaitra, as a date of the Gupta era, falling in A.D. 588. And I said in respect of No. 71 — “Its extreme interest “lies in the fact that, as the Mahānāman, whose record it is, can hardly be any “other than the well-known person of that name who wrote the more ancient “part of the Pali Mahavamsa or History of Ceylon, its date shews either that “the details of the Ceylonese ehronology, as hitherto accepted, are not as reliable “as they have been supposed to be, or else that a wrong starting-point has been “selected in working out those detail, and it furnishes a definite point from “which the chronology may now be adjusted backwards” (Gupta Inscrs., 1888, Introd. p. 16, see also id., texts, p. 275 f., and IA, xv, 1886, p. 357).
What I have said on the present occasion, I have said with a full knowledge of what Mr. Vincent Smith has written (IA, xxxi, 1902, p. 192 ff.) with a view to upsetting both the identification proposed by me and the remarks made by me in connection with it, and also a different identification proposed by M. Sylvain Lévi with the result of interpreting the date of the record as a date of the Śaka era, falling in A D. 347 (JA, 1900, i, pp. 401–411)
M. Lévi's proposal, in connection with the Śaka era, is altogether unsustainable. And, for my part, I have to withdraw an alternative suggestion made by me, that the date of the record might be a date of the Kalachuri or Chēdi era, falling in A.D. 518 (Gupta Inscrs., Index, pp. 320, 324). My original explanation of the date, as a date of the Gupta era, falling in A.D. 588, is the correct one.
I endorse Mr. Smith's conclusion (IA, xxxi, 1902, p. 193) that the undated inscription No. 72, of the Sthavira Mahanāman, is some fifty years earlier than the dated inscription No. 71. And it is, no doubt, a record of the first Mahānāman of the inscription No. 71, whom Mr. Smith has styled “the spiritual grandfather” (loc. cit., p. 193) of the second Mahānāman of that record, the one to whom the date in the year 269 belongs.
For the rest, Mr. Smith's conclusions are wrong. They rest primarily upon a belief that the Ceylonese chronology is substantially accurate from B.C. 161 onwards (loc. cit., p. 195, line 17 ff.). That, however, is a quite erroneous belief, which is traceable back to another initial mistake, or rather an initial unsustainable assertion, made by Mr. George Tumour (see, e.g., JASB, vi, 1837, p. 721), and which can be easily exploded.
The suggestions which I put forward in 1886 and 1888 in respect of the Ceylonese chronology, are quite correct. Tumour selected, for working it out, a wrong starting-point, B.C. 543, which is not asserted by, or supported by anything contained in, either the Dipaiamsa or the earlier part of the Mahāvamsa, but was simply invented in (as far as I can see my way clear at present) the twelfth or thirteenth century A D. And we are gradually obtaining items of information from various sources, which shew that the details in the Ceylonese chronicles are not accurate in respect even of names, much less of dates.
But it is possible that the author Mahanāman should be identified with the Sthavira Mahānāman (loughly about a.d.538) of the Bōdh-Gayā undated inscription No. 72, rather than with the second Mahānāman (A.D. 588) of the dated inscription No. 71. This, however, is a point which will have to be thought out on some other occasion, when I shall have more to say about the circumstances in which Mahānāman wrote the Padyapadānuvaṁsa or Padyapadōruvaṁsa, and about the mistake of taking him to be a maternal uncle of king Dhātusēna who is supposed to have reigned A.D. 459 to 477 or 463 to 479.
page 19 note 1 For instance, Jina, in the Suttanipāta, verses 379, 697, 996 (ed. Fausboll, pp. 67, 131, 182), and in the Dīpavaṁsa, 1, 30, 80; 4, 10 (ed. Oldenberg, pp. 15, 20, 31), and in the Mahāvaṁsa (Turnour, p. 2, line 12, p. 3, line 6, p. 9, line 13, “our Vanquisher was a son of the great king Suddhōdana and of Māyā”); and Mahāvīra, in the Suttanipāta, verses 543, 562 (pp. 98, 106), and in the Dīpavaṁsa, 1, 49; 2, 52; 3, 58 (pp. 16, 24, 30), and in the Mahāvaṁsa (p. 2, line 3).
page 21 note 1 The facsimiles distinctly shew :— vālata hadha cha. As will be seen immediately, there are several writer's mistakes in this part of the record. And we must correct the text into:— palata hidha cha; in which palata is the local form of the Pāli paratō, = the Sanskṛit paratas, ‘farther, far off.’
page 22 note 1 M. Senart went nearer than Dr. Bühler to the meaning of this passage. But it is not possible to follow him in reading savata, for the Pāli sabbatō, the Sanskṛit sarvatas, ‘from all sides, in every direction, everywhere.’ The original distinctly has savara; and Dr. Bühler recognised that it indicated saṁvara, though he took it as, apparently, a nominative, and translated it by “(learning to) subdue his senses.” In saṁvarā, we have the ablative, used adverbially. Saṁvara is given in Childers' Pāli Dictionary as meaning ‘closing, restraint.’ It is there explained that ‘restraint’ is of five kinds. The fifth restraint is viriya-saṁvara, ‘the restraint which enables a man to make an active exertion.’ And that is the sense which I take.
I have taken what seems to be here the plain purport of āhāla from the meaning ‘employing, use,’ which is given to āhāra in Monier-Williams' Sanskṛit Dictionary on the authority of the Kātyāyana-Śrautasūtra. There is a particular use of the word āhāra,— not yet explained, but perhaps to be explained in much the same way,— in between the mention of ārambha, ‘exertions,’ and iṅgita, ‘commotions,’ — in the Suttanipāta, verses 747, 748, and the prose preceding them.
It does not seem appropriate, even if practicable, to follow Dr. Bühler (IA, vi, 157, note §) and M. Senart (Insers. de Piya., ii, 194, and IA, xx, 164, 16), in finding in this passage of the edict a pun based on a secondary allusion to boiled rice, a viaticum, and condiments.
page 25 note 1 I should have liked to include in my remarks something of what Professor Rhys Davids has said, in his recently published Buddhist India, about the teaching “Wanderers” of ancient India, as contrasted with the “ Hermits” who lived in fixed abodes in the forests occupying themselves in meditation and the performance of sacrificial rites or in the practice of austerities, and about the high esteem in which the “Wanderers” were held by the people at large, and the part that they played in the development of Buddhism. But it was only after my article had gone to the printers, that I became aware of his book. The recognition of Buddha as “the Wanderer” presented itself to me independently, some time ago, as a natural result of my own inquiries.
page 26 note 1 For the insertion of these words, compare the familiar aṅkatō=pi of later records.