Collection of Prakrit and Sanskrit Inscriptions

Author(s): P Piterson
Publisher: Bhavnagar Archiological Department

Page 15

therefore make due allowance for a state of society and opinions altogether different from our own." The precepts referred to would lave delighted the author of the Ancient Mariner :
"IIe praycth best who loveth best
All things both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us,
Tie made and loveth all." Nor would the teaching of the " Beloved of the Gods" have seemed strange to that other Teacher who said "Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground withont your Father." Asoka's teaching and our practice may indeed be widely different, but it is not the forner that "makes the angels weep." Writing in the India of to-day it is impossible not to desire to call attention to the wise and earnest words in which Asoka taught the doctrine of universal toleration of the religious opinions and practices of others, not as a matter of high state policy, but as a duty man owes to man. He himself desires to honour good men of whatever religion they may be, and he warns the bigots, whose notion of religion consists in a furious attack on the religion of other people, that they will in the end only do themselves harm thereby. That is not religion. “Proper treatment of servants and subordinates, reverence for one's elders, sincere self-restraint towards all that has life and breath, sincere charity to good men, whether they be Brahmins or Buddhists, these things consecrate religion." Is the Christian guilty of irreverence who is again reminded of other similar teaching that with difficulty raises its still small voice above the clamour of his contending sects, " Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this : To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world."
The second series of inscriptions presented by our book refers to a dynasty which held wide stay in Western India from about 70 B.C. to about 400 A.D., and of which these writings on stone and some handfuls of coins are all that remains. They are here called the Såbs, but it has been recently shown that that is a wrong name for them. They are better known by the title they give themselves-Kshatrapas or Mahâkshatrapas. The names of, and some scanty particulars with regard to, no less than twenty-seven sovereigns of this house have now been recovered, but the interest of the inscriptions in our book is confined
Ahol Shrutgyanam