Chapter 5 India 165Teresa,” writes Doniger (2009:202). This work, the Arthashastra, advocates not
only military might but “wit and intellect as well as guile, cunning, and
deceit”—surveillance and even assassination in the practice of statecraft (Khil-
nani 2016:32). Here’s one example: impress people with your brilliance by pre-
dicting someone is going to die, then have him killed. Kautilya assumed a
world of kings in perpetual conflict, of mandalas (circles) of competing inter-
ests, where spy craft was essential, bureaucrats were likely to be corrupt (he
identified 40 forms of embezzlement), and royal power needed to be autho-
rized by priestly ritual action. However, even with all this political realism,
kings needed to seem indifferent to power and wealth for its own sake.
Kautilya comes as a shock up against the more common idealized picture of
ancient kings. Think especially of the beloved Rama, whose golden age still stands
as some kind of moral political idea in modern India. Another king, forgotten for
ages in India but revered throughout the Buddhist world much as Rama is revered
in India, was Ashoka, known in his time as King Piyadassi, “beloved-of-the-
gods.” He inherited the vast Mauryan Empire built by his grandfather and pushed
it further south in his early years in bloody wars against southern kingdoms such
as the Kalinga. Legends tell of his conversion to Buddhism and repentance for the
suffering his wars inflicted, followed by development of a new moral code for
kings, a rajadhamma (rajadharma) of tolerance and compassion for his subjects and
improvements—we might call them infrastructure—to make social life function
better. He built a road connecting the western cities like Taxila across the agricul-
tural lands of North India to his capital at Pataliputra that came to be called the
Grand Trunk Road (and still exists). Along its route he planted banyan trees and
mango groves and dug ponds and built resting places for travelers.
Ashoka propagated Buddhism as the moral compass of his empire in vivid
and concrete ways. He is said to have divided the remains of the Buddha into
84,000 caskets and built 84,000 stupas (among them were some of the stupas
opened by Charles Masson in Afghanistan) across his empire to hold them.
These became centers of spiritual power and merit, functioning like temples to
draw Buddhist pilgrims. He also had constructed pillars and rock monuments
memorializing his values at the borders and in important centers of the empire.
These continue to be discovered; the number stands at 33 today (see box 5.4).
The inscriptions are in brahmi, a script created toward the end of the first mil-
lennium B.C.E., but gradually lost over the next centuries, so that for long the
monuments could not be read, even by the greatest scholars.^1
These rock edicts appear to be personal to Ashoka, often written in his very
voice, and give a glimpse of the Buddhist values he extolled. For example, Rock
Edict IV:
Promulgation of dhamma has increased that which did not exist over many
centuries: abstention from killing, kindness to creatures, respect to relatives,
respect for Brahmans and Shramanas [ascetics],^ and obedience to mother,
father and elders. This dhamma conduct has increased in diverse ways, and
will increase more thanks to King Piyadassi, beloved of the gods.