Jainism Early Faith of Ashoka

Author(s): Edward Thomas
Publisher: Trubner and Company London

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THE EARLY FAITH OF AŞOKA.
I now arrive at the primary object, which, in nominal terms, heads this paper, regarding the relative precedence of Jainism and Buddhism, as tried and tested by the ultimate determination of “the early faith of Aşoka."
In the preliminary inquiry, I have often had to rely upon casual and inconsecutive evidence, which my readers may estimate after their own ideas and predilections. I have at length to face what might previously have been regarded as the crucial difficulty of my argument; but all doubts and obscurities in that direction may now be dissipated before Aşoka's own words, which he or his advisers took such infinite pains to perpetuate-under the triple phases of his tardy religious progress-on rocks and big stones, and more elaborately prepared Indian Lats or monoliths.
It is fully ascertained, that the knowledge of the characters of this Lát alphabet, together with the power of interpreting the meaning of these edicts, had been altogether lost and obscured in the land, where these very monuments stood undefaced, up to the fourteenth century A.D.; when Firúz Shah, on the occasion of the removal of two of the northern monoliths to his new city on the Jumna, ineffectually summoned the learned of all and every class and creed, from far and near, to explain the writing on their surfaces. It is therefore satisfactory to find that, so to say, Jaina records had preserved intact a tradition of what the once again legible purport of the inscriptions reveals, as coincident with the subdued and elsewhere disregarded pretensions of the sect.
Abul Fazl, the accomplished minister of Akbar, is known to have been largely indebted to the Jaina priests and their carefully preserved chronicles, for much of his knowledge of the past, or Hindú, period of the empire he had to describe statistically, under the various aspects of its soils, its revenues, its ancient legends, its conflicting creeds, etc. In his Ain-e-Akbari he has retained, in his notice of the kingdom of Kashmir, three very important entries, exhibited in the
1 My Pathan Kings of Dehli, p. 292. General Cunningham, Arch. Rep. vol. i. pp. 156, 161. "Elliot's Historians, vol. iii. p. 352.