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AUGUST, 1891.)
THE INSCRIPTIONS OF PIYADASI.
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agreement is far from existing amongst the different sources of the tradition, and according to Taranátha, so it was six brothers whom the king made away with. According to other authorities there was no murder at all, but it is replaced by other acts of cruelty. In the Asóka-avadána, s1 the prince slays his officers and his wives, and sets up a 'hell,' in which a number of innocent people are submitted to the most refined tortares.82 According to a Sinhalese account, 93 Asöka sends a minister to re-establish regular practices amongst the Buddhist clergy, who are troubled by the treacherous intrusion of a great number of false Brahmanical brethren. Infuriated against the monks who refused under these conditions to celebrate the upôsatha, the minister decapitates several with his own hand. He only stops, when the very brother of the king offers himself to receive the fatal blow. The king, being informed of what has occurred, falls a victim to cruel anguish of conscience. In the north, we are told how Asoka, to punish profanation committed by Brahmaņical mendicants upon a statue of the Buddha, sets a price upon their heads, and how he only desists from his executions when his brother, who is here called Vîtiśoka, is, in mistake, slain as one. All these accounts are at the same time very analogous, and vers different. It is equally impossible to accept any of the versions as good historical coin. We can recognise them, without difficulty, as more or less independent developments of two ideas common to both sets. The first is the antithesis between the criminal conduct of Asoka before his conversion, and his virtuous conduct subsequently to it. In this way the Asúku-avadóna's places the conversion of Asoka in direct relation with his 'hell,' by the intermediary of the pious Samudra. The other is the memory of a certain opposition between the king and the Brahmaņs. It reappears in the southern account of his conversion, and is there attributed to the comparisons, unfavourable to the Brâhmans, which arose in the heart of the king: between them and his nephew, Nigrôdha the sramilana.
In his inscriptions, Piyadasi himself enlightens us as to the origin of his conversion. He draws for us a mournful picture of the deeds of violence which accompanied the conquest of Kalinga, the thousands of deaths, the thousands of harmless people carried off into slavery, families decimated, Brâhmaņs themselves not escaping the miseries of the defeat. It is this spectacle which filled him with remorse, and which awakened in him a horror of war. Here we are upon a solid ground of history. It is very probable that the literary versions are only later amplifications of this kernel of simple and certain truth. The sentiments which Piyadasi explains to us in the 13th edict, would appear to exclude the idea of a career of craelties and of crimes pursued through several entire years. So much for the first point of view.
As for the second, Piyadasi himself, if I correctly translate the difficnlt passage at Sahasaram declares to us that, after his conversion, he proceeded to deprive the Brahmans of that almost divine prestige which they enjoyed throughout the whole of India. Without any doubt, he did not persecute them violently; at the same time he approves of the alms which were given to them ; but he must have marked his preference for the Buddhist religion by various means which it is not difficult to imagine. It is this proceeding, doubtless, which has been transformed in the literary tradition into an absolute banishment, - nay rather, a bloody persecution of the Brahmaņs.
In both cases, a comparison of the monuments with the legends and the chronicles tends to show, 1st, that the traditions are marked by grave exaggeration, and are full of arbitrary amplifications, and 2nd, that they are dominated by religious and specially by monastic prepossessions, - prepossessions which were infinitely more precise than any which ever existed in the mind and at the time of Piyadasi. All other observations lead to a similar conclusion
We know, from the 2nd edict, that Piyadasi claims the credit of having spread abroad
# Germ. translat. p. 28. n Tirso Atha, pp. 28 and f., contains yet other variations, # Afoka-avadana sp.Barneaf, pp. 428 and {.
31 Barnoaf, Introduction, pp. 864 and if *5 Mahávaniwa, pp. 39 and ff. *5 loc. cit., pp. 867, and fr.
