214 Part III: South Asia
women in his harem. He employed an executioner who contrived to carry out
all the tortures of the Buddhist hells right here on earth. One day his execu-
tioner imprisoned a Buddhist monk, intending to execute him the next day.
The monk spent the night in meditation and achieved enlightenment. The next
morning he was thrown into a cauldron of human blood, urine, and excrement.
Just as Ashoka arrived to witness the execution, the monk began floating tran-
quilly on a lotus blossom in the midst of the filth and horror. Ashoka begged
for an explanation. “I am the son of the Compassionate Buddha who has cut
through the tangles of worldly inclinations,” the monk told him. “I am
detached from all modes of existence” (Strong 1983:217). He told Ashoka of a
prediction by the Buddha that 100 years after his Parinirvana a cakravartin
named Ashoka would spread his teachings by distributing his relics far and
wide. “But instead you have built this place of suffering.” Hearing these words,
Ashoka put his hands together in repentance: “Forgive me this evil deed.
Today I seek refuge in the Sangha, the Buddha, and in the Dharma that is
taught by the noble ones.” After his conversion he distributed fragments of the
Buddha’s body throughout the world in 84,000 stupas (a number connoting
totality). From then on he became known as Dharmashoka.
As Dharmashoka, he was both cakravartin, “world ruler,” and Buddhist
layman. Ashoka enacted his rajadharma by many acts of religious donation
(daan) to the monastic community (the sangha), culminating every five years in
giving away all his worldly possessions. He spread Buddhism throughout his
empire by edict and beyond it by sending out missionaries, including his own
son to Ceylon. He built stupas and endowed monasteries.
Buddhist iconography during this period remained symbolic: the empty
throne, the sacred Bodhi Tree, a footprint, the wheel of dharma, but never rep-
resentation in human form.
The focus was typically Indian in its preoccupation on psychological ques-
tions: suffering is a psychological state and salvation comes from control of
one’s own mind. Buddha discovered these laws and passed them to his disci-
ples, leaving an “open hand” when he died, all his insight passed on for others
to learn. The perfected saint was the arhat such as the one who survived the tor-
tures of Chandashoka; a monk who, like Buddha, had achieved extinction of
desire and will no more be reborn in this world.
The Second 500 Years: Mahayana Buddhism (1–500 B.C.E.). Great changes
take place in Buddhist thought. To realize in oneself the true nature of things is
the path to salvation. Monasteries and renunciation continue, but another route
opens for laypeople. A few fully enlightened saints are raised to the status of bod-
hisattvas, god-like beings who halt on the brink of extinction for eons to bring sal-
vation to others. Rather than veneration of a dead teacher, eternal bodhisattvas
such as Amitabha, Avalokiteshvara, and Maitreya are now objects of worship,
barely distinguishable from deities. They bring salvation to laypeople who are not
able to become religious virtuosi like the monks. Around 100 C.E. a variant of nir-
vana arose in the Gandhara area known as the Pure Land paradise. Rather than