#261: THE VANISHING EMPEROR.  Charles Allan’s Ashoka: The Search for India’s Lost Emperor (Abacus Books, 2012) is a good book on a great subject.  Reading even causally in the history of Buddhism, one encounters the story of Ashoka, who in the third century BCE became India’s first avowedly Buddhist emperor.  He promoted Buddhism throughout the subcontinent primarily by carving the precepts and exhortations into rocks and onto standing pillars, a number of which are still visible throughout India.  He is sometimes thought second only to Gautama Siddhartha himself in the spread of Buddhism, changing it from a local creed to a major world system of thought.  He is an acknowledged and dominant figure in any contemporary account of Buddhism, so it’s a bit of a shock to learn that until a process of rediscovery in the nineteenth century, he was almost forgotten, and in some cases thought possibly to be merely a creature of myth.

       The decline and near-vanishing of Buddhism in its native India has until recently largely been chalked up to the Muslim invasions, beginning in the eight century CE and capped off by the destruction of Nalanda, the great Buddhist learning center, in 1193, which included the burning an estimated nine million books.  The decline however is now thought to have begun well before this time.  Buddhism, having become a state-supported religion, had begun to lose its contact with the laity; the monasteries owned property, and Buddhist monks no longer relied on daily begging rounds for their subsistence.  In turn this coincided with a new kind of scholasticism in Buddhism, which included their adoption and adaptation of Shaivite tantric writings and practices.  This provided an opportunity for the Vedic Brahmins, who were touched in a delicate place by the Buddhist monks’ indifference to their rituals and authority, to practice Hinduism’s almost amoebic ability to absorb outside influences, and the Buddha was simply included in the Hindu pantheon as the ninth incarnation of Vishnu (when you can’t conquer, co-opt).  Here we can see the Indic application of Orwell’s famous statement, “He who controls the past controls the future.  He who controls the present controls the past.”  Ashoka, as the champion and promoter of what was perceived as a heretical sect, began to be written out of the records, or excoriated as a heretic in the Puranic writings; the scavenging of materials from old Buddhist sites went on, and time did the rest.  Ashoka got disappeared.

        Flash forward to the nineteenth century.  In amidst the imperialists and wealth-seekers of the British Raj, there were also, inevitably, men (women were not invited to play) whose curiosity was piqued by the evidences of a vastly ancient culture and used their leisure and their influence to investigate it.  We forget, in the absence of the now ubiquitous distractions of the media, how much some of these Victorians could get done.  They absorbed the local languages with what seems to us amazing speed; uncovered long-neglected records, began archaeological digs, and went at all this with near-obsessive determination.  They deciphered, with local assistance, the forgotten Brahmi script of the Ashokan pillars. There was, of course, a lot of thoughtless scavenging going on; any visit to the Asian rooms of the British Museum will give you a hint of how much.  But much of these people’s work was honest and enormously productive, and scholars are still building on the bases of what they produced.  Allen’s book indeed is, in a quiet and polite way, an attempt at vindication of the early generation of Orientalists that Edward Said (often rightly) scorned.  He details the varied work—archaeological, linguistic, historical—that revealed an Ashoka worthy of the reputation and interest he now enjoys.  At some of the Buddhist pilgrimage sites and elsewhere in India, the pillars can still be seen, with their inscriptions still visible; the capital of the pillar at Sarnath, with its four lion figures, was chosen by Nehru to be the national image of India.  The pillars have a sheen, the famous Mauryan polish, that belies their immense age.  Allen’s book, with its enthusiastic account of many jobs well done, polishes Ashoka to similarly vivid and legible sheen.  Nice work.