SECULAR NATIONALISM DEVELOPED in India with its own myths and legends. In his self-transformative, nationalist classic,
The Discovery of India, Jawaharlal Nehru quotes H. G. Wells: “Amidst the tens of thousands of names of monarchs that crowd the columns of history … the name of Asoka shines, and shines almost alone, a star…. More living men cherish his memory today than have ever heard of Constantine or Charlemagne.”
1 In another work,
Glimpses of World History, Nehru writes,
Men of religion have seldom, very seldom, been as tolerant as Ashoka. In order to convert people to their own faith they have seldom scrupled to use force and terrorism and fraud. The whole of history is full of religious persecution and religious wars, and in the name of religion and of Gods perhaps more blood has been shed than in any other name. It is good therefore to remember how a great son of India, intensely religious, and the head of a powerful empire, behaved in order to convert people to his ways of thought. It is strange that any one should be so foolish as to think that religion and faith can be thrust down a person’s throat at the point of the sword or a bayonet.
2
In the mythology of secular nationalism, Asoka is the tolerant king par excellence. It was only a matter of time before a step was taken within the nationalist narrative to move from tolerance to secularism. It was claimed that Ancient India, particularly in Asoka’s time (304–232
B.C.E.) and because of his initiative, formulated a conception of the proto-secular state in India.
3 Asoka’s tolerance toward all religions was the forerunner of the policy of religious neutrality associated with secularism. The clear implication of this was that this new attempt would not have been possible without something akin to a secular state in the Indian tradition.
This view has been vigorously challenged in India, particularly for its inexcusable anachronism—it reads too much of the present into the past. Obviously at issue here is not the term secular. The anachronism is not due to the extrapolation of a currently used term to an entity in the past. The absence of a suitable translation of secular in any Indian language is only a small piece of evidence in the overall argument, not its conclusion. Even the absence of a clear concept points only to the low level of articulacy of secular orientation, not to the lack of it. The crux of the matter is the availability of a conceptual resource. But let me not confuse the reader by introducing the distinction between a concept and a conceptual resource. Assume that some scholars have claimed that a full-fledged attempt, regardless of its success then or in the future, was made by Asoka to formulate a conception of what we now call the secular state. A few years ago I would have ridiculed this claim on the ground that ideas presuppose specific contexts and these contexts are not reproduced from time to time. However, today I am only cautiously critical because I see that these scholars were trying to put their finger on something important, even though they were making obvious mistakes in doing so.
In order to rescue the claim, we need to formulate it differently: at crucial junctures in Indian history, certain conceptual spaces were opened up that, under certain conditions, and provided we build an appropriate narrative, can be seen to contribute to the growth of modern secularism. I have used the phrase
conceptual spaces in the plural. I mean here that some spaces open up simultaneously or over time, which enable multiple historical agents to imagine new concepts, provided they have the motivation to do so. A conceptual space may open up and may remain wholly unutilized for long periods of time, sometimes so long that it may entirely recede out of our background, totally forgotten. Or else, it may get filled up by concepts, though these concepts may be in different stages of articulacy, some clearly formed, others only half done, still others barely born. Some concepts in the space may have a very short life—they get made, are used and destroyed; others have a much longer period of gestation. Most are revived, modified, recast, recycled, reappropriated. Some are even mutated. The important thing is they are available in the conceptual stock as a resource, for use, dissemination, and, under certain conditions, for mobilization.
A reasonably articulated and complex concept draws elements from multiple conceptual spaces, provided there are agents with the motivation to do so. This usually happens over long periods of time. This conceptual work is never fully finished, and frequently the elements are never fully related to one another. So one may find different concepts generated over different periods of time that retrospectively belong to one family or strongly resemble one another. Seen teleologically, some older conceptual elements may even be seen as evolving into something that is now well formed. At key moments in the history of a society, all these elements drawn from different periods of history, and therefore from different conceptual spaces, may be forged together to form a broad conception. Such a conception may even crystallize around a single word. Often the same word is used as the foci of the crystallization of many related conceptions. One can trace their different trajectories and offer a narrative of the different sources of a concept and a term associated with it (or many concepts and a term or one concept with many terms associated with it).
Now, I wish to argue that one such space was opened up in the third century B.C.E. by Asokan edicts and filled by the conception of Dhamma, and this partly explains its crucial importance to modern India’s secular project. But Asoka’s Dhamma can be easily misunderstood. Official Indian ideology, encouraged by modern scholarly commentators, have frequently associated it with the idea of toleration. This is misleading, particularly if we don’t grasp the background context in which Dhamma emerges. Dhamma, I argue, was a major attempt to introduce norms of civility among rival followers of major systems of beliefs and practices, to forge an order where potentially conflicting religious and philosophical groups could enjoy principled coexistence.
TWO EDICTS ON INTERGROUP RELATIONS
Asoka’s edicts, rediscovered between the late eighteenth century and the mid-twentieth century, lie scattered in more than thirty places throughout India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Most of them are written in Brahmi script, from which all Indian scripts and many of those used in Southeast Asia later developed. The language used in the edicts found in the eastern part of the subcontinent is Prakrit, associated with the people of Magadh; the one used in edicts found in the western part of India is closer to Sanskrit, using the Kharoshthi script; one extract of edict 13 is in Greek and one bilingual edict in Kandahar, Afghanistan is written in Greek and Aramaic. Asoka’s edicts, the earliest decipherable corpus of written documents from India, have survived throughout the centuries because they are written on rocks, cave walls, and stone pillars. These edicts were decodified by British archaeologist and historian, James Prinsep.
The location of the rock edicts, often governed by the availability of suitable rocks, are found along the borders of the empire; the edicts on pillars were largely in specific cities and along roads within the empire. Some, like the Lumbini pillar, mark the Buddha’s birthplace, while its inscriptions commemorate Asoka’s pilgrimage to that place. Others are to be found wherever there was sufficient concentration of populations so that they could reach as many people as possible. These edicts appear to be in Asoka’s own words rather than the more formal language in which royal edicts or proclamations in the ancient world were usually written. At the core of these edicts are a set of precepts about how to lead a good individual and collective life. For the purposes of this essay, however, I focus on two major rock edicts, no. 7 and no. 12.
What do these edicts tell us? The seventh edict begins, “The beloved of the gods wishes that “all Pashandas
4 must dwell everywhere, in every part of his kingdom.”
5 This seems like a simple, quite inconsequential statement and has been treated as such by commentators who have a rather sanguine view of social and religious conditions in Asoka’s India. Thus Vincent Smith claims that
the Dharma which he preached and propagated unceasingly with amazing faith in the power of sermonizing, had few, if any, distinctive features. The doctrine was essentially common to all religions. When we apply to Asoka’s policy the word “toleration” with its modern connotation and justly applaud the liberality of his sentiments, another qualification is needed, and we must remember that in his days no really diverse religions existed in India. Buddhism and Jainism both were originally mere sects of Hinduism—or rather schools of philosophy founded by Hindu reformers—which in course of time gathered an accretion of mythology around the original speculative nucleus, and developed into religions.
6
The same sentiment is echoed by Radha Kumud Mookerjee, who says, “It is to be remembered that Asoka’s toleration was easy enough among the different denominations of the time, which were all but offshoots of the same central faith and did not differ among themselves so completely as the religions of Jesus, Zoroaster, or Mahomet introduced later into the country. Thus it was not difficult for the emperor, with due credit to the liberality of his views, to discern ‘the essence of the matter in all sects’ and honour it duly.”
7To be sure, some commentators recognized what might have been at stake that compelled the inscription of some Asokan edicts.
8 For instance, D. R. Bhandarkar says that people in Asoka’s times had lost sight of the essentials of their faith and begun to focus excessively on rituals and theology. In these matters there was unending acrimonious wrangling. Therefore, “When Asoka lived and preached, religious fanaticism and sectarian spirit were rampant.”
9 Yet even he seems not to make the connection between Asoka’s wish to have different religious groups cohabit to the rampant sectarianism of that time. Bhandarkar does not seem to recognize the real import of Asoka’s wish. What plausibly was the thick context in which he was compelled to
say this? Why should Asoka have said this? What could the context be in which he is compelled to
say this? We get no sense of this from existing literature.
10 At any rate, it is not clear what form this strife took. Were sects expelling one another from territories where each was dominant? Had they segregated one another? Was something akin to what we now call “ethnic or religious cleansing” attempted in that period? But if intense sectarian strife existed, there must at least have been some violence between sects, even if it was not purely motivated by doctrine. It is again difficult to tell unless we try and imagine vividly what the background conditions were to some of these key edicts.
The twelfth edict implores that all pashandas restrain their speech, a specification of a more general self-restraint, samyama, mentioned in the seventh edict. This is seen as a virtue, even a civic virtue. But why restrain only speech? Why is this the core, the saara of all pashandas? Why burden it with so much importance? What is the link between restraint on speech and co-existence? Does speech have the power to disrupt coexistence? We all know that it can but under what conditions is it so acutely significant as to become one of the central problems of a society and the chief concern of its royal edicts? Does speech have the power to push everyone over the edge, or are people already so much on the edge that even speech can push them over it? Surely it is easy for a reasonable person to tolerate people with whom she has minor differences. The difficulty of tolerance arises only when people with major, virtually irreconcilable differences encounter one another. What then is the context in which speech is virtually the sole carrier of deeply uncomfortable, major differences?
BACKGROUND: PRE-AXIAL CONFLICTS IN INDIA
The sixth century
B.C.E. was a period of great social ferment. Karl Jaspers has famously termed this extraordinary period in world history the Axial Age. Jasper’s own formulation is deeply problematic, yet it does point to something of huge importance in every major civilization.
11 Among Indian historians, Romila Thapar came quite close to making much the same point. She describes this period as a “century of questioning.” There was vigorous debate and discussion among multiple sects concerned both with “religious belief and philosophical speculation.” Among these Thapar singles out the uncompromising materialism of the early Charvakas, the metaphysical subtleties of the Upanishadic thinkers, and the dominant ritualism of the Vedic brahmins. It seems that for her local, internal critiques had by this period given way to a more general and accentuated social critique, hence the term the “century of questioning.” I do not dispute this, but quite clearly the term
axiality refers to something deeper, signaling that something extraordinarily new was now at stake. Thapar’s description of this ferment does not quite get here.
I believe that, despite all its problems, the term
axiality is not entirely inappropriate for this period, for something new and very radical begins to take shape, changing the entire intellectual landscape and carrying the potential of an enormous social revolution.
12 In order to better grasp what I have in mind, I would try to offer a quasi-phenomenological account of this period.
Pre-Buddhist India was dominated by the Vedas. The Rg Veda, the first and most important of these, contains hymns first meant only to be recited and much later written down. The hymns were essentially for the kshatriyas and the brahmins and reflected the beliefs and practices of these two upper castes. The hymns centered around sacrificial rituals (yajnas) performed for wealth, good health, sons, and a long life for the yajamana—all constituents of a this-worldly conception of human flourishing. Some sacrifices were simple, domestic affairs, performed by the householder. Others involved animal sacrifice in order to procure horses, cows, land, and more riches, for which the participation of ritual specialists was requisite.
Ritual sacrifice was also seen to be propitiating gods: powerful, mostly benevolent beings who could be persuaded by these offerings to intervene in the world of men. Dharma in the Rg Veda refers to ritual sacrifice—“sacrifice as the power supporting the cosmos and sustaining life and, socio-economically, as the law men must act upon.”
13 Because it refers to something other than and, in some sense, beyond human beings, it is not anthropocentric. Yet as it largely involves a transaction between self and the world, it would not be inappropriate to call it an ethic of self-realization. To attain all this-worldly goods, ritual sacrifice must be performed and gods propitiated so that they can intervene in this world to facilitate self-realization.
Two interesting developments within this worldview must also be noted. First, sacrificial rituals increasingly became longer, elaborate, and complicated, sometimes necessitating the simultaneous involvement of several Brahmanas.
14 This meant the deployment of massive wealth to perform the ritual and to offer
dakshinas (donation, fee, or reward) to the Brahmanas. Second, as these rituals became more complex and expensive, they appeared to enhance the intrinsic worth of the ritual, as if a magical quality inhered in the sacrifice itself and its performance was sufficient to yield all goals of human flourishing. All attention began to be paid to the precision with which the elaborate ritual was performed, down to its minutest detail. The slightest deviation could result in the frustration of the desired objective. The more sacrifice was regarded as possessing a mystical potency superior even to the gods, the more the propitiation of gods became redundant or at best secondary. As Surendranath Dasgupta puts it, “If performed to perfection, it was capable of fulfilling the desired objective independent even of the gods”
15Another question to be addressed is this: how must we reconcile the assertion that the entire purpose of sacrifice was for this-worldly human flourishing with the claim that one of the purposes of rituals was to yield benefits beyond this life and that the world was not only for humans but also included gods? A couple of points should help resolve this apparent contradiction. First, a distinction between the terrestrial and the celestial is compatible with both spheres existing in the same cosmos. Gods were immortal and moved constantly between the terrestrial and the celestial, but this mobility was very much a part of this cosmic world, quite like movement of birds and planes, no matter how high they soar, is a part of the same world. Second, the cessation of life on earth meant a flight to another
loka—
swargaloka or
narkaloka—depending upon the quantum of spiritual merit acquired.
16 However these lokas too were a part of the same cosmos, not radically otherworldly. Some of them were inhabited by gods, some by demons, and others by ancestral spirits. Life after death was life in another of these lokas, very much in this cosmic world conceived more widely. Indeed, there is more than a hint in several texts of that period where
amratva (“immortality”) means simply the endless duration of one’s life in this world of sensuous enjoyment, a notion far closer to
samsara than to anything resembling
moksa.
We already have here indications of several sources of potential conflict between followers of different weltanschauungs as well as among those with a similar worldview: an internal conflict within followers of Vedic teachings, first, between those who indulged in expensive and elaborate rituals and those who found this baroque quality entirely unnecessary, wasteful, and distracting from their primary objectives; second, between those who believed in the necessity of propitiating gods and those who gradually moved away from this view and felt that the only significant action (
karma) was the sacrifice (
yajna) itself.
A third conflict also existed. Several commentators attest to the presence of pre-Aryan people in India. One such group was probably called Munis, a wandering group of sparsely clad ascetics, deeply skeptical about the idea of a creator of the universe, believing that the world in which they lived was real and that salvation in this world was possible by exacting practical discipline.
17 They were generally pessimistic about other forms of liberation in this world and had little conception of any other world. The Munis are infrequently mentioned in the Vedas, but that is probably due to their radical difference with the Vedic tradition and their consequent marginalization. It does not mean that their existence in this period was rare.
18 Thus a third major conflict existed between the Vedics and the pre-Vedic Munis, one ritualistic, believers in gods, seeking this-worldly goods and pleasures, and very largely materialist, the other renouncing this-worldly pleasures and rituals, rejecting beliefs in gods, and seeking liberation deep in the forests through rigorous practical discipline.
THE BACKGROUND: CONFLICT BETWEEN PRE-AXIAL AND AXIAL RELIGIONS
I believe we now possess a richer understanding of the background to Asoka’s Dhamma, but are still nowhere near capturing the deeper and perhaps more central conflicts of that period. A new cosmology, born out of the confluence of existing Vedic and pre-Vedic traditions but radically opposed to them, illustrates the first of these.
19The key difference lies in the birth of the idea of radical transcendence and therefore of a duality between this world (
samsara) and
Brahman or
Atman, the ultimate reality pervading the whole universe or our deepest inner, imperishable selves. Samsara is radically separated from Brahmana or Atman in that the latter can be achieved only by totally negating the former. Liberation (
moksha, mukti) from the cycle of
samsara could be achieved only through
jnana, knowledge that could not be obtained through mere intellectual exertion.
Jnana was knowledge of an inner, intuitive, experiential kind that could only come upon the seeker as a sort of revelation that would transform him instantaneously. Against Vedic ritual sacrifice, we find, in the
Chhandogya Upanishad (3.8.11), Yagnavalkya tell Gargi that moksha cannot be attained by performing sacrifices. Nor could moksha be obtained, contra the Muni and early Jain tradition, by physical austerities even for thousands of years. Offerings (
dana), sacrifices, recitations of Vedas, and performance of austerities may earn merit, but only steadfastness in pursuit of the knowledge of Brahman would help us achieve moksha or true immortality.
20Both Brahman and Atman are wholly outside the given, immanent, and mundane world and manifest a point from which one can, to use Benjamin Schwartz’s phrase, “stand back and look beyond” and contemplate it. Hence the appropriateness of the term radical transcendence. Hence also the aptness of the use of axiality. The Upanishads provide the axial turn in Indian civilization. Here we have the birth of a major potential conflict between vastly different weltanschauungs. For nothing that the Vedic peoples or the Munis think to be significant is truly or ultimately important for Upanishadic thinkers. Indeed, what is of great value to one worldview might be of least value to the other.
Nonetheless, there is one sense in which the break between the pre-Vedic/Vedic and the Upanishadic followers may not have been total. This has to do with the necessary place of others in an ethic of self-realization. What follows are very tentative remarks, the principal import of which is that higher-order other-related values or principles (let’s call this morality higher, separate, and transcendental) are negligible or secondary in pre-Buddhist thought in the Indian subcontinent. Allow me to elaborate. For Vedic Brahmanism, Dharma has less to do with what we owe one another. Neither sacrificial rituals nor gods are invoked for the good of the generalized others, say for the Munis. In both its individual or collective forms, this is a self-focused ethic of fulfillment or realization. The content of this ethic does not change with the introduction of the idea of radical transcendence. The early moment of the axial turn in Indian civilization does not appear to make the generalized other central to its ethic of individual or collective self. To be sure, notions of justice, right, and wrong exist, but these are probably in the hands of the kshatriya king, matters decided in any given context by his will or judgment. Dharma in its Vedic or post-Vedic Upanishadic senses has very little to do with what we, by some transcendental necessity, owe one another.
All this begins to change with developments in later Upanishadic thought and more clearly with the Buddha. With Buddha’s teachings, the transcendental point, to use Gananath Obeyesekhre’s phrase is “ethicised” (in my terminology, one might say moralized).
21 From now on, judgments of the rightness or wrongness of action are “mediated and delayed.” They may even be enunciated after one’s death. This is the birth of transcendental morality—a transcendental evaluation of the rightness or wrongness of action in relation to others that affects a person’s life not in this world alone but his destiny after death, outside this world. This also entails a shift in the meaning of Dharma. Dharma from now on also begins to mean this radically transcendental morality. Quite clearly, there must have been not only a conflict between ancient ethics and this new ethic inspired by Buddha but also a contest over the meaning of key terms, such as
Dharma. We now have two radically differing notions of dharma, one a particular ethic of a single-cosmos oriented (this-worldly) self-realization and the other, a transcendental morality for all concerned with right interpersonal conduct. Indeed, even the term
interpersonal is not quite correct, because the conduct in question includes how human beings behave toward nonhuman animals. “All” means all humans and animals, virtually all living species. The protest over ritual sacrifice was perhaps more against the sacrificial killings of animals. This made eminent economic sense, but is not reducible to it. For the kshatriyas, war had become a mode of life, and perhaps the greatest benefit yielded by yajna sacrifice was success in war. The kshatriyas needed animals, which they stole from ordinary pastoralists. War, on the other hand, meant not only the arbitrary killing of humans and animals but also the destruction of people’s livelihood. Thus both pastoralists and small farmers may have risen in protest against war and sacrificial killing.
22 Buddha’s teachings thus instantiate a major transvaluation of Vedic values, a “dynamic best captured in Assmann’s notion of normative inversion whereby one group’s rights and responsibilties are turned by another group into prohibitions and scandals.”
23A thicker description of the multiple sources of manifold conflicts in Asoka’s times is now clearly available. In addition to the three conflicts mentioned earlier, in this section I have provided an account of at least two conflicts that probably go much deeper: between pre-Vedic and Vedic immanentists and transcendentalists who developed the Upanishads and evolved the notion of the radical distinction between samsara and Brahman/Atman. A second, even deeper conflict exists between two different ethics, one Upanishadic, which has a transcendental metaphysics but no (or perhaps a weak) conception of transcendental morality, and the other that opposes transcendental orders of the real outer or inner world, but develops a strong idea of transcendental morality that allows judgments from outside any this-worldly point on the actions of every subject, both self- and other-related—i.e., related to one’s kith and kin, one’s community (
jati), and even those entirely outside one’s fold. The social ramifications of this conflict can hardly be overestimated.
I hope to have shown the deeply mistaken character of the view that religious interaction in Asoka’s period of rule was relatively trouble free and that he must have had an easy time finding common ground among followers of different schools of thought. It is well known that shared philosophical and cultural assumptions provide no immunity against intense conflicts. The assumption that offshoots of an entity conflict weakly with their parent is even more untenable. Buddhism may have been an offshoot of “Hinduism” but conflicted with it at many levels, on many issues. As for Jaina philosphy, it is not even entirely clear what epistemic gain ensues in seeing it simply as an offshoot of Hinduism. Thus, Vincent Smith and Radha Kumud Mookerjee clearly underestimate the depth of conflict in Asokan times. Thapar and Bhandarkar are right that this was a period of intense and bitter sectarian conflict. However, in my view, even they are unable to home in on the novelty of what was at stake in Asoka’s period. By vividly representing the central conflicts of those times, this account now gives an entirely different gloss on Romila Thapar’s remarks that this is a period of intense sectarian struggles and to her claim that the sixth century
B.C.E. was “the century of universal questioning.”
24 It also helps us to see the real issues at stake in those struggles—a conflict between notions of weak and radical transcendence as well as between immanent and transcendental moralities. The sixth century
B.C.E. must have been a century of massive intellectual and emotional turmoil with gigantic social implications, the like of which had never been witnessed earlier. It appears that the need of the times was a political morality that could arbitrate between multiple, radically different, often incommensurable rival conceptions so that each could coexist and learn from one another.
25THE REAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE SEVENTH EDICT
I hope by now we also possess a much better understanding of what exactly is so novel about the harmless-looking statement in the seventh edict. Given the many-layered, incrementally deep conflicts involving several different groups and the necessity imposed by trade and urban conditions for them to cohabit, Asoka had to evolve some way to hold them together. Buddha’s teachings had provided him with conceptual resources to imagine something that would be more than ad hoc and tactical, something long-lasting and endorsable from within each pashanda’s perspective.
26 They had given him the hope in the development of public norms from below and the redundancy of orders from above. One of them was that all pashandas must dwell everywhere in his empire.
Among historians, only D. D. Kosambi appears to have grasped the true importance of this statement. Kosambi believes that the edict is meant to communicate primarily to leaders of each pashanda rather than directly to pashandas themselves. Through the seventh edict, Asoka effectively grants these leaders permission to travel freely everywhere in the kingdom to provide them an opportunity to teach and convert each other. Asoka impartially grants this privilege to religious teachers of all pashandas. It is likely that the edict became necessary because mutual interaction and the attempt to preach once own ethics to others had begun to cause severe friction, leading to the birth of local rules forbidding one pashanda from communicating with or, worse, entering into the territory of another pashanda—something akin to what Sudipta Kaviraj in a different context has called back-to-back neighborliness. Instead of perpetuating mutual exclusion and the resulting homogenization of each settlement, Asoka, it seems, gives assurances to the leader of each pashanda that they must feel secure everywhere and encourages free interaction and dialogue amongst them, albeit now regulated by moral norms.
As mentioned earlier, he is able to do so by virtue of a major conceptual transformation, facilitated by a change in the background conditions, perhaps even in the social imaginary. A new form of society, far more heterogeneous than the original simple tribe community, had come into being. Living together here was terribly different, but, at the same time, no longer an optional extra, but inevitable, a natural part of one’s environment. To respond to the crisis generated by radical heterogeneity, a new legitimating ethic became necessary. Buddha’s teachings made possible a different conception of Dharma. It needed a great leap of imagination to arrive at the view that what we call dharma can be used not only for personal self-fulfillment or the fulfillment of the needs of specific groups, but rather to ease the newly emergent problems of a form of society that simply could not do without diverse groups. It is a discovery of the first magnitude that dharma or religion can be used to ease the difficulties of early society, to make the common life of diverse elements of society easier. It necessitated that a collective ethic substitute correct ritual by good deeds for the sake of others.
Moreover, Buddha’s teachings opened up the possibility of the radical sociopolitical restructuring of the world and the self by politico-moral action from above. Buddha’s ethic included the pivotal importance of moral action. Once one stands outside the whole cosmos and is able to see its limitations, and once the transcendental point from which one examines the cosmos is viewed as emanating a moral vision, it becomes possible to imagine a profound restructuring of society and polity in accordance with that vision. Once again, D .D. Kosambi is imaginatively on to this point when he says that, more than a personal conversion of the emperor, there appears to have taken place in Asokan times a deeper conversion of the whole previous state apparatus. The king not only preaches a new morality but is able to launch radically new political and administrative measures that include public morality as an essential ingredient and provide a framework within which radically differing ethics can coexist and nourish one another.
27Also emerging at this time in India is the idea of the Cakravartin, the wheel turner. The wheel that these great rulers turn is the wheel of Dharma. Whereas the Buddha turned the wheel of the Dharma in the religious sphere, the cakravartin turns it in the political sphere. The cakravartin conquers other kingdoms not by physical force but by moral appeal.
28 Wherever he travels he is welcomed, and people voluntarily submit to his rule out of respect for his adherence to the principles of Dharma. The cakravartin represents the Buddhist political ideal of the just ruler or universal monarch who brings peace and prosperity to his subjects.
29 “The normative king, it seems, is intrinsic to the social and moral order of the world.”
30Given the birth of the idea of a moral ruler or the “normative king,” a third interpretation of the statement in the seventh edict is also possible. Here the focus is less on what leaders or followers do to one another and more on the relationship between the king and pashandas. It is safe to assume that throughout the pre-Asokan period the king could expel Brahmanas and
sramanas from his territorial domain. Through the seventh edict, Asoka attempted to prevent this. Given that right and wrong actions were determined by the king himself, there must have been arbitrary exercise of power. The law must not have been applied in a consistent or legitimate manner but in a highly personal and arbitrary one. Thus
rajas are often depicted as rewarding or punishing according to the way their personal interests were served.
31 Thus the seventh edict was an attempt to tame the institution of kingship and to contain the absolute exercise of power by the application of the principle of dhamma. Indeed, the reconceptualization of dhamma may also be viewed as an attempt to transform power into authority by infusing it with certain norms. Dhamma was an immutable moral principle that was above the king, the raja of the raja.
SEARCH FOR A COMMON GROUND
What, despite profound differences in worldviews, could the basis of such coexistence be? For a start, the possibility of coexistence depended on toleration, the capacity to put up with the practices of others despite deep moral disagreement. Better still, it needed mutual adjustment and accommodation. Vedic, Brahmanical ethics needed to be moralized, to some degree; the shramanic worldview, the worldview of Buddhists, Nirgranthis, and Ajivikas needed to accept some value in rituals and rites. This could hardly have been easy, given the shramanic contempt for rituals and the brahmanic distaste for antiritualistic, transcendental morality. The edicts encourage partial reconciliation. They note that rituals play an important role in the daily lives of people. They are also significant on occasions of birth or marriage of sons and daughters, journey, sickness, and death.
32This concession to rituals is subtly though not totally offset by welfare measures mentioned in the edicts, presumably something all good kings must undertake. Asoka speaks of the importance of planting banyan and mango trees, digging water wells, building rest houses, and securing varieties of medicinal herbs, hinting that it is the duty of the king to provide a healthy life and physical comfort to his subjects. This is echoed elsewhere in Buddhist texts. “After the
cakkavatti had brought the entire universe under his umbrella, he must proceed to ensure that his people live in comparative comfort, in a world where destitution has been wiped out. Instead of only punishing offenders, which would merely ensure the stability of the social order but not make for moral order, the normative king first had to provide the poor and deprived with the essentials of existence.”
33 The
dhammikodhammaraja must not merely be concerned with upholding the property and family rights of people in society, but go beyond these minimum obligations and also ensure that everyone’s basic needs are met.
34Several edicts mention, however, the limited value of rituals and ceremonies. They may be appropriate in certain contexts, but “bear little fruit” and are of “doubtful value.”
35 More importantly, rituals do not address one of the most burning moral issues of the times: interpashandic disagreement and conflict. Hence, edict 12 says, “The beloved of the Gods does not wish to overvalue gifs and sacrifice. More important than these is the reverence one’s faith commands or the number of its followers or its core ethical values. Even more important than these ethical values are the essentials of all faiths and pashandas. It is these essentials that constitute the common ground of these seemingly conflicting conceptions.”
36What then is the common ground among rival conceptions? For Asoka, dhamma constitutes the all-important common ground, the essentials, of all pashandas. What then are these essentials? Interpreters here give differing answers: Dhamma is sometimes seen as virtue, religious truth, or simply piety. But the most convincing answer, consistent with what has been mentioned previously and substantiated by Obeyesekre and Tambiah, is that dhamma is akin to transcendental morality. If so, it is fair to say that for Asoka rites and rituals have no meaning unless embedded within an ethical perspective, and the ethical import of these gifts is overridden by their lack of moral significance. This is why they may be offered only
as long as they are not injurious to anyone (humans as well as nonhumans). No animal may be killed in order to be sacrificed. Nor should there be any
samaja (“assembly”) for such a purpose, implying that other kinds of assemblies, especially the
sangha, are permissible.
37What then is the content of dhamma? The fundamental principle of dhamma is vacaguti, variously interpreted as “restraint on speech” or “control on tongue.” It is significant that the edicts recommend that there be restraint on speech, but have little to say on restraining actions. Its almost as if the spoken word is not only more important than the written word but also more significant than physical action. Here again it is crucial to retrieve the surrounding context of Asokan edicts.
THE TWELFTHTH EDICT: RESTRAINT ON SPEECH
We can’t recover that world, but we can imagine one where virtually nothing is written or read. Writing and reading have not yet taken possession of our psyche.
38 Speech has no visual presence; it can’t be seen. Every word is spoken. Language is rooted and resides almost entirely in sound. Text, meaning something strung together, is also only spoken and heard. Everything is thought aloud and communicated. The spoken word carries the entire burden of our emotional life, all that uplifts or gets us down, brings us together or pulls us apart. The entire complex of art, philosophy, and religion—poetry, our deepest metaphysical thoughts, acts to honor gods and goddesses are all spoken, recited, sung, chanted, and heard. All these are composed, transmitted, stored, reproduced, and enriched orally. One might even say then that life itself is lived in sound. And, perhaps, destroyed in sound too.
Not only life but also public life is lived and extinguished in sound. Indeed, the public domain is constituted almost entirely by the spoken word and can therefore be disassembled by it too. After all, when words flow off the tongue effortlessly, they also tumble out inadvertently and, what is worse, carelessly. But then, words that matter must be enunciated with great care and even greater thought, for once uttered they can’t be withdrawn. It is important in such cultures to differentiate such unguarded speech from one that carries weight or is valued. If they are to perform all the functions that the written word serves for us now, such treasures must be stored and remembered in memorable forms. To be remembered without being written and to be effective, this speech must be crafted with great economy and be crisp, rhythmic and rendered with great power. Only thus will it transform into a powerful mode of action. Words in oral cultures have always had enormous power. They can beckon gods to help us tide over problems, create something out of nothing, empower or disempower others, turn them into stone, even kill them. Words can be weapons or an elixir. They can soothe or cause grievous hurt. In oral cultures, words have magical potency.
One can hardly overestimate the immediacy and vibrancy of social interaction and, more pertinently, the agonistic energies in predominantly oral societies and its publics. Verbal duels, speech fights, word wars, verbal tongue lashings of adversaries in intellectual combats—all these are commonly found in societies largely unaffected by writing. Moreover, vitriolic reciprocal name-calling exists frequently, with fulsome expression of self-praise and excessive bragging about one’s own prowess.
Given this context, one can now understand why oral speech acts appear to have more weight than all other forms of action. It is almost as if the greatest harm that might be inflicted on the other is through speech rather than physical action. It is not clear from the edict what the level of physical violence in that society was, if social interaction was already civil enough for people to even conceive that they could injure or kill one another over philosophical or religious differences. At any rate, either “hate speech” was considerably more significant than physical violence or else physical violence was largely confined to the territorial aggression and politics among the kshatriyas. Quite certainly the antagonistic energy in speech was unmatched even by physical violence. Generally people knew how to do things with spoken words. They poked fun, ridiculed, abused, cursed, mocked, scoffed at, were satirical and sarcastic, belittled and humiliated others—all by subtle manipulation of the spoken word.
Madhav Deshpande provides an extremely interesting example of the oral skills of ancient Indians.
39 The term
devanaampriya literally means beloved of the gods. In the edicts the word is used extensively as an honoric adjective for Emperor Asoka. This is a bit odd, because the edicts were written after Asoka had turned Buddhist, and in this early period of Buddhism the existence of gods was frequently denied. The Vedics frequently refer to followers of Buddhism and Jainism as
devadvis, i.e., haters of god. Deshpande recounts an interesting passage from the
Skanda Purana in which Vishnu is reincarnated as Buddha in order to first lure the
asura Mauryans. The
shudras, Vedics believed, had wrongly usurped the rule of the earth into abandoning the Vedic dharma, making sacrifices redundant and denying the existence of gods and then destroying them in a battle between
devas and
asuras. In a battle between good and evil, the real lovers of the gods, the Vedic people had to defeat all those who were haters of gods. In short,
devanaampriya could be used as an honoric title only for Vedic kings. How then could Asoka, a ruler who was not from the kshatriya caste and who is widely believed to deny the existence of gods, refer to himself as
devanaampriya? From Asoka’s point of view to follow his ancestors in using this term was perfectly valid politically and morally. He wished to support and get support from all pashandas, not only from fellow Buddhists, Ajivikas, and Nirgranthis but also from followers of Vedic dharma, those who believed in gods and in the value of ritual sacrifice for their propitiation. But from the Vedic point of view this usage must have been entirely inappropriate. However, instead of trying to reappropriate it, the Vedics began to use the term as one of abuse and contempt. Even Upanashadic philosophers might have used the term in the same manner, implying a fool (
moorkha), i.e., devoid of the knowledge of the Brahma.
Devanaampriya became a synonym of
devadvis. Devanaampriya now begins to have a negative valance because a once-positive term is being used sarcastically. In short, they fiercely contested the legitimacy of Asoka’s use of the term for himself by first disassociating, then renouncing, and finally denouncing the term.
TWO FORMS OF SELF-RESTRAINT
We do not have much evidence of the verbal battles and hate speech of that period, but the edicts imply that verbal wars in that period were intense and brutal. They simply had to be reined in. But what kind of speech must be curbed? Edict 12 says that speech that without reason disparages other pashandas must be restrained. Speech critical of others may be freely enunciated only if we have good reasons to do so. However, even when we have good reasons to be critical, one may do so only on appropriate occasions and even when the occasion is appropriate one must never be immoderate. Critique should never belittle or humiliate others. Thus there is a multilayered, ever deepening restraint on one’s verbal speech against others. Let us call it other-related self-restraint. However, the edicts do not stop at this. They go on to say that one must not extols one’s own pashanda without good reason. Undue praise of one’s own pashanda is as morally objectionable as unmerited criticism of the faith of others. Moreover, the edicts add that even when there is good reason to praise one’s own pashanda, it too should be done only on appropriate occasions and never immoderately. Undue or excessive self-glorification is also a way to make others feel small. For Asoka, blaming other pashandas out of devotion to one’s own pashandas and unreflective, uncritical, effulgent self-praise can only damage one’s pashanda. By offending and thereby estranging others, it undermines one’s capacity for mutual interaction and possible influence. Thus there must equally be multitextured, ever deepening restraint for oneself. Let this be self-related self-restraint.
Elsewhere, in the seventh edict, Asoka emphasizes the need not only for self-restraint,
samyama, but also
bhaavshuddhi, again a self-oriented act.
Bhaavashuddhi is frequently interpreted as self-purification, purity of mind. However, this term is ambiguous between self-purification within an ethic of individual self-realization or one that at least includes cleansing one’s self of ill-will toward others. My own view is that, in the context of the relevant edicts, the moral feeling of goodwill toward others or at least an absence of ill will toward others must be a constitutive feature of what is meant by
bhaavshuddhi. Self-restraint and self-purification are not just matters of etiquette or prudence. They have moral significance.
Given all this, and in order to advance mutual understanding and mutual appreciation, it is better, the edict says, to have samovaya, concourse, an assembly of pashandas where they can hear one another out, communicate with one another. They may then become bahushruta, i.e., one who listens to all, the perfect listener, and open-minded. This way they will not only have atmapashandavraddhi, the growth in the self-understanding of one’s own pashanda, but also the growth of the essentials of all. The edicts here imply that the ethical self-understanding of pashandas is not static but constantly evolving, and such growth is crucially dependent on mutual communication and dialogue with one another. Blaming others without good reason or immoderately disrupts this process and, apart from damaging dhamma, diminishes mutual growth.
The edicts add that no matter how generous you are with gifts and how sincere your devotion to rituals, if you lack samyama, bhaavshuddhi, and the quality of bahushruta, then all the liberality in the world is in vain. Conversely, one who is unable to offer gifts but possess the aforementioned virtues lives a dhammic life. Thus one whose speech disrespects no one, who has no ill will toward others, and who does no violence to living beings is truly dharmic. Dharma is realized not by sacrifice but by right speech and conduct.
IS THIS TOLERATION?
Thapar says, “the 7th edict is pleading for toleration among all sects.”
40 Likewise, the term
religious tolerance is also used by Tambiah.
41 Is the term
toleration or
tolerance appropriate in this context? In the classical seventeenth-century meaning of the term, to tolerate is to refrain from interference in the activities of others, although one finds them morally disagreeable, even repugnant, and despite the fact that one has the power to do so.
42 Here one puts up with, even suffers, the morally reprehensible activities of others. The powerless other escapes interference of the powerful because the latter shows mercy toward them, a virtue in the powerful exercised in relation to those who do not really deserve it. Let’s call this a hierarchical notion of toleration, given the asymmetry of power between the two groups and the attitude of superiority that one has toward the other. A second conception exists: Two groups, equally powerful, may also tolerate one another. Each has power to interfere in the activities of others and each finds the other morally repugnant, but both refrain from doing so because the mutual costs are too high. This is modus vivendi toleration. Clearly the Asokan case does not fall within either of these two conceptions.
A third conception is also nonhierarchical. Here A and B refrain from interfering in each other’s activities out of indifference and because they don’t particularly believe that one is more powerful than the other. True, they do not heartily approve of each other. The acceptance of one another may be somewhat grudging, more out of resignation than enthusiasm. It may also be true that this new disposition is a result of the dilution of the perceived power of the larger group, softened by the force of principles or reason or commerce or due to the disuse of collective power in matters concerning ultimate ideals. Neither really cares for another, as long each keeps out of the other’s way. This is live-and-let-live attitude, one that is found in postindustrial, individualist, liberal societies. Everyone, in this conception, has a right to be, as long as he causes no harm to others. I may disapprove of what you do, but as long you do it in your privacy and not in my face I don’t really care. The Asokan case does not fall under this conception either. If none of these conceptions is able to cover the Asokan case, then why use the term?
The basic idea of toleration is that A does not accept B’s views or practices, but still refrains from interfering in it, even though one has the power to do so. A fourth conception may not violate this basic idea and yet be distinct from the other three conceptions. Parents often put up with the blemishes of their children that they would not suffer in others. We choose to overlook a fault in our lover, even in our close friends, that we would not excuse in anyone else. We might endure deep difference in worldviews in fellow citizens because we value fraternity. In all such cases we put up with dislikeable states of doing or being in others, even if we have some power to do something about them, simply because we have love or loving feelings for them. Here one tolerates not despite hate but rather because one loves the other. A mixture of love, friendliness, and fellow feeling is in the background or becomes the ground of a different conception of toleration.
Unlike other conceptions, which presupposes the idea that oneness with significant others as well as God is achieved by abolishing/ignoring/belittling the radical other, i.e., by eliminating plurality, here, in the second conception, oneness is attained by accepting all radical others as equally significant because they variously manifest one supreme being or concept. Thus to tolerate is to refrain from interfering in the life of others not despite our hatred for them, nor because we are indifferent to them, but because we love them as alternative manifestations of our own selves or some basic norm common to all of us. We may not be able to do or be what they are, we may even dislike some of their beliefs and practices, but we recognize that they are translations of our own selves or of gods within each of us. This binds us together in a relationship of lasting affection.
So suppose that A accepts the value of many though not all of B’s beliefs and practices, but recognizes that beliefs and practices he does not accept follow from some of those he does or that some beliefs and practices he is unable to endorse follow inescapably from B’s different background, then, out of respect for some of his beliefs and practices, A would put up rather than interfere with those with which he disagrees. Asoka’s views, I believe to have shown, fall broadly within this fourth conception. If so, one might use the term toleration in this context, as long as one is careful not to confuse it with the other three, more standard conceptions.
But in the end it is perhaps better to avoid using the term
toleration. No matter what its surrounding context, toleration focuses solely on a set of other-related self-restraints. But Asokan edicts clearly go beyond this by also making it necessary to observe a set of self-related self-restraints. In mutual toleration, each observes identical forms of self-restraint: I don’t interfere in your beliefs and practices and you don’t in mine. But the edicts speak instead of what we might call correlative self-restraints. One is not asked to refrain from excessively criticizing others and oneself. Instead, one is asked not to immoderately, and without good reason, be critical of others or indulge in the correlative practice of self-praise, quite a different thing altogether. It is by simultaneously observing both forms of self-restraint that one completes a moral act. It is better to say then that the edicts outline original norms of civility and principled coexistence among radically differing pashandas in a deeply heterogeneous society.
The distinction between the two forms of self-restraint is important because it helps us to more clearly see why Asoka’s political morality is not reducible to but goes beyond toleration in every sense of the term. An example here from our own time might illustrate my point. India is a country where a majority of its people either call themselves or are taken to be Hindus. Though not entirely, the ethos of many of India’s social and political institutions is saturated by one or the other strand of “Hinduism.” So, regardless of our evaluative judgment, it would not be entirely incorrect to say these institutions are somewhat Hinduized or wear a Hindu look. Yet India also has Muslims, Christians, Parsees, Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs, atheists, and people with many other not so easily definable outlooks. Sections of Hindus may find their practices disagreeable, morally discomforting, or just downright strange, but they tolerate them. They may collectively have power to interfere in them, even banish them, but they refrain from doing so. Indeed, legally they have no other option. These religious communities have rights not to be interfered with in their religious and cultural practices. But the minorities will not be able to effectively exercise their rights if Hindus do not possess the capacity for other-related self-restraint. Most Hindus do, as a matter of fact, exercise such restraint. But is this sufficient for a morally justified coexistence between Hindus and minority communities? Suppose then that community-specific rights of minorities are respected, but Hindu self-assertion becomes more pronounced. Let us say they build new temples around every corner, ensure that these are mightier in size than mosques and churches, fund new radio and television channels that stream Hindu teachings and no other, introduce textbooks that speak largely of and glorify Hindu gods and goddesses, change national and state symbols in order to make them explicitly and exclusively Hindu, and so on. What would the impact be on the psyche of the minorities? Most likely, it will increase their sense of social and cultural alienation. It will force them to feel left out of many public domains. It might even lower their self-esteem. Alternatively, Hindus can show some self-related self-restraint, so as not to show off, to not always wear their religion and culture on their sleeve, to not always advertise their wares. Indeed, to persistently announce in public that you are the boss in your own country might be a sure sign of deep-rooted insecurities and anxieties, one that is both potentially damaging to others and to oneself. Abandoning this self-related self-restraint might then adversely affect everyone and destroy the very fabric of contemporary Indian society.
I have argued that Asoka’s conception and policy of dhamma cannot be properly understood unless we vividly imagine the background conditions within which it emerged. The ambition of a new public morality widely endorsed by all affected groups could not have been possible without the pressing need to come up with a novel initiative in conditions of acute conflict among rival worldviews. At the center of these struggles were bitter disputations between predominantly one-world-oriented practioners of ritual sacrifice and those who opposed such violent rituals and sought a transcendental, world-negating morality for all. The availability of new conceptual resources forged during these disputes made it possible to devise a policy that, though not guaranteed to succeed, gave hope for a durable principled coexistence between groups engaged in fierce verbal disputes. This new political morality placed at the center a series of self- and other-related restraints. Only the simultaneous exercise of these new voluntary constraints could ensure amicable collective living. This policy might be called toleration, but only with a massive change in its dominant meaning. On standard interpretations, toleration involves the privatization of ill will or hatred. Both must be neutralized, if not expunged. However, this new notion implies no such thing. Quite the contrary, for it presupposes in the background something closer to goodwill and respect. But, in the end, even this might not be appropriate. Till we discover a suitable prakrit, pali or sanskrit term, it is best to call it civil.
APPENDIX: THE TWO ROCK EDICTS IN TRANSLATION
ROCK EDICT VII
His Sacred and Gracious majesty desires that in all places should reside people of diverse sects (pashandas). For they all desire restraint of passions [samyama] and purity of heart [bhava-’sudhi]. But men are of various inclinations and of various passions. They may thus perform the whole or a part (of their duties). But of him whose liberality is, too, not great, restraint of passion, inner purity, gratitude and constancy of devotion should be indispensable and commendable.
Translated by Radha Kumud Mookerjee, Asoka (New York: McMillan, 1928), pp. 149–50.
ROCK EDICT XII
King Priyadarsi honours men of all faiths, members of religious orders and laymen alike, with gifts and various marks of esteem. Yet he does not value either gifts or honors as much as growth in the qualities essential [
sàra-vadhi] to men of all faiths. This growth could take many forms, but its root is in guarding one’s speech [
vachi-gutì] to avoid extolling one’s own faith and disparaging the faith of others improperly or, when the occasion is appropriate, immoderately.
43The faiths of others all deserve to be honored for one reason or another. By honoring them, one exalts one’s own faith and at the same time performs a service to the faith of others. By acting otherwise, one injures one’s own faith and also does disservice to that of others. For if a man extols his own faith and disparages another because of devotion to his own and because he wants to glorify it, he seriously injures his own faith.
Therefore concord (samavàyo or samanvaya) alone is commendable, for through concord men may learn and respect the conception of Dharma accepted by others. King Priyadarsi desires men of all faiths to know each other’s doctrines and to acquire sound doctrines.
44 Those who are attached to their particular faiths should be told that King Priyadarsi does not value gifts and hours as much as the growth in the qualities essential to religion in men of all faiths. Many officials are assigned to tasks bearing on this purpose—the officers in charge of spreading Dharma, the superintendents of women in the royal household, the inspectors of cattle and pasture lands, and other officials. The objective of these measures is the promotion of each man’s particular faith and the glorification of Dharma.
Translated by N. A. Nikam and Richard McKeon, The Edicts of Asoka (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1962), pp. 58–59.
NOTES