Edicts of Ashoka


The Edicts of Ashoka are a collection of more than thirty inscriptions on the Pillars of Ashoka, as well as boulders and cave walls, attributed to Emperor Ashoka of the Maurya Empire who ruled most of the Indian subcontinent from 268 BCE to 232 BCE. These inscriptions were dispersed throughout the areas of modern-day India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and provide the first tangible evidence of Buddhism. The Edicts are the earliest written and datable texts from India, and, since they were inscribed on stone, we have the added benefit of having them exactly as they were originally inscribed. Earlier texts, such as the Vedic texts, were all composed and handed down orally until later dates.
Ashoka used the expression Dhaṃma Lipi to describe his own Edicts. The edicts describe in detail Ashoka's policy on dhamma, an earnest attempt to solve some of the problems that a complex society faced. According to the edicts, the extent of his promotion of dhamma during this period reached as far as the Greeks in the Mediterranean region. While the inscriptions mention the conversion of Ashoka to Buddhism, the dhamma that he promotes is largely ecumenical and non-sectarian in nature. As historian Romila Thapar relates:
In his edicts Aśoka defines the main principles of dhamma as non-violence, tolerance of all sects and opinions, obedience to parents, respect to brahmins and other religious teachers and priests, liberality toward friends, humane treatment of servants and generosity towards all. It suggests a general ethic of behaviour to which no religious or social group could object. It also could act as a focus of loyalty to weld together the diverse strands that made up the empire. Interestingly, the Greek versions of these edicts translate dhamma as eusebeia and no mention is made anywhere of the teachings of the Buddha, as would be expected if Aśoka had been propagating Buddhism.’
The inscriptions show his efforts to develop the dhamma throughout his empire. Although Buddhism as well as Gautama Buddha are mentioned, the edicts focus on social and moral precepts rather than specific religious practices or the philosophical dimension of Buddhism. These were located in public places and were meant for people to read.
In these inscriptions, Ashoka refers to himself as "Beloved of the Gods". The identification of Devanampiya with Ashoka was confirmed by an inscription discovered in 1915 by C. Beadon, a British gold-mining engineer, at Maski, a town in Madras Presidency. Another minor rock edict, found at the village Gujarra in Gwalior State, also used the name of Ashoka together with his titles: Devanampiya Piyadasi Asokaraja. The inscriptions found in the central and eastern part of India were written in Magadhi Prakrit using the Brahmi script, while Prakrit using the Kharoshthi script, Greek and Aramaic were used in the northwest. These edicts were deciphered by British archaeologist and historian James Prinsep.
The inscriptions revolve around a few recurring themes: Ashoka's conversion to Buddhism, the description of his efforts to spread dhamma, his moral and religious precepts, and his social and animal welfare program. The edicts were based on Ashoka's ideas on administration and behavior of people towards one another and religion.

Decipherment

Besides a few inscriptions in Greek and Aramaic, the Edicts were mostly written in the Brahmi script and sometimes in the Kharoshthi script in the northwest, two Indian scripts which had both become extinct around the 5th century CE, and were yet undeciphered at the time the Edicts were discovered and investigated in the 19th century.
The first successful attempts at deciphering the ancient Brahmi script were made in 1836 by Norwegian scholar Christian Lassen, who used the bilingual Greek-Brahmi coins of Indo-Greek king Agathocles to correctly and securely identify several Brahmi letters. The task was then completed by James Prinsep, an archaeologist, philologist, and official of the East India Company, who was able to identify the rest of the Brahmi characters, with the help of Major Cunningham. In a series of results that he published in March 1838 Prinsep was able to translate the inscriptions on a large number of rock edicts found around India, and to provide, according to Richard Salomon, a "virtually perfect" rendering of the full Brahmi alphabet. The edicts in Brahmi script mentioned a King Devanampriya Piyadasi which Prinsep initially assumed was a Sri Lankan king. He was then able to associate this title with Ashoka on the basis of Pali script from Sri Lanka communicated to him by George Turnour.
The Kharoshthi script, written from right to left, and associated with Aramaic, was also deciphered by James Prinsep in parallel with Christian Lassen, using the bilingual Greek-Kharoshthi coinage of the Indo-Greek and Indo-Scythian kings. "Within the incredibly brief space of three years the mystery of both the Kharoshthi and Brahmi scripts, the effect of which was instantly to remove the thick crust of oblivion which for many centuries had concealed the character and the language of the earliest epigraphs".

The Edicts

The Edicts are divided into four categories, according to their size and according to their medium. Chronologically, the minor inscriptions tend to precede the larger ones, while rock inscriptions generally seem to have been started earlier than the pillar inscriptions:
  • Minor Rock Edicts: Edicts inscribed at the beginning of Ashoka's reign; in Prakrit, Greek and Aramaic.
  • Minor Pillar Edicts: Schism Edict, Queen's Edict, Rummindei Edict, Nigali Sagar Edict; in Prakrit.
  • Major Rock Edicts: 14 Edicts and 2 separate ones found in Odisha; in Prakrit and Greek.
  • Major Pillar Edicts: 7 Edicts, inscribed at the end of Ashoka's reign; in Prakrit.
;General content
The Minor Rock Edicts as well as the Minor Pillar Edicts are very religious in their content: they mention extensively the Buddha, the Sangha, Buddhism and Buddhist scriptures.
On the contrary, the Major Rock Edicts and Major Pillar Edicts are essentially moral and political in nature: they never mention the Buddha or explicit Buddhist teachings, but are preoccupied with order, proper behavior and non violence under the general concept of "Dharma", and they also focus on the administration of the state and positive relations with foreign countries as far as the Hellenistic Mediterranean of the mid-3rd century BCE.

Minor Rock Edicts

The Minor Rock Edicts of Ashoka are rock inscriptions which form the earliest part of the Edicts of Ashoka. They predate Ashoka's Major Rock Edicts.
Chronologically, the first known edict, sometimes classified as a Minor Rock Edict, is the Kandahar Bilingual Rock Inscription, in Greek and in Aramaic, written in the 10th year of his reign at the border of his empire with the Hellenistic world, in the city of Old Kandahar in modern Afghanistan.
Ashoka then made the first edicts in the Indian language, written in the Brahmi script, from the 11th year of his reign. The texts of the inscriptions are rather short, the technical quality of the engraving of the inscriptions is generally very poor, and generally very inferior to the pillar edicts dated to the years 26 and 27 of Ashoka's reign.
There are several slight variations in the content of these edicts, depending on location, but a common designation is usually used, with Minor Rock Edict N°1 and a Minor Rock Edict N°2, the different versions being generally aggregated in most translations. The Maski version of Minor Rock Edict No.1 is historically particularly important in that it confirmed the association of the title "Devanampriya" with the name "Asoka", thereby clarifying the historical author of all these inscriptions. In the Gujarra version of Minor Rock Edict No.1 also, the name of Ashoka is used together with his full title: Devanampiya Piyadasi Asokaraja.
File:Gujarra Devanampiyasa Piyadasino Asokaraja.jpg|thumb|upright=1.5|The full title Devanampiyasa Piyadasino Asokaraja in the Gujarra inscription.
There is also a unique Minor Rock Edict No.3, discovered next to Bairat Temple, for the Buddhist clergy, which gives a list of Buddhist scriptures which the clergy should study regularly.
A few other inscriptions of Ashoka in Aramaic, which are not strictly edicts, but tend to share a similar content, are sometimes also categorized as "Minor Rock Edicts". The dedicatory inscriptions of the Barabar caves are also sometimes classified among the Minor Rock Edicts of Ashoka.
The Minor Rock Edicts can be found throughout the territory of Ashoka, including in the frontier area near the Hindu Kush, and are especially numerous in the southern, newly conquered, frontier areas of Karnataka and southern Andhra Pradesh.

Minor Pillar Edicts

The Minor Pillar Edicts of Ashoka refer to five separate minor Edicts inscribed on columns, the Pillars of Ashoka. These edicts are preceded chronologically by the Minor Rock Edicts and may have been made in parallel with the Major Rock Edicts.
The inscription technique is generally very poor compared for example to the later Major Pillar Edicts, however the Minor Pillar Edicts are often associated with some of the artistically most sophisticated pillar capitals of Ashoka, such as the Lion Capital of Ashoka, which crowned the Sarnath Minor Pillar Edict, or the very similar, but less well-preserved Sanchi lion capital, which crowned the very clumsily inscribed Schism Edict of Sanchi. According to Irwin, the Brahmi inscriptions on the Sarnath and Sanchi pillars were made by inexperienced Indian engravers at a time when stone engraving was still new in India, whereas the very refined Sarnath capital itself was made under the tutelage of craftsmen from the former Achaemenid Empire, trained in Perso-Hellenistic statuary and employed by Ashoka. This suggests that the most sophisticated capitals were actually the earliest in the sequence of Ashokan pillars and that style degraded over a short period of time.
These edicts were probably made at the beginning of the reign of Ashoka, from the year 12 of his reign, that is, from 256 BCE.
The Minor Pillar Edicts are the Schism Edict, warning of punishment for dissent in the Samgha, the Queen's Edict, and the Rummindei Edict as well as the Nigali Sagar Edict which record Ashoka's visits and Buddhist dedications in the area corresponding to today's Nepal. The Rummindei and Nigali Sagar edicts, inscribed on pillars erected by Ashoka later in his reign display a high level of inscriptional technique with a good regularity in the lettering.