Empire: World History - 129. Ashoka: The Great Buddhist Emperor of India

Episode Date: March 7, 2024

Ruling in the 3rd century BC, Ashoka was one of India’s greatest ever rulers. Under his rule, the Mauryan Empire grew into the largest empire India had ever seen. Its capital, Pataliputra was a dazzling, glorious, cosmopolitan city that was eleven times larger than Athens. After a brutal conquest of the Kalinga kingdom, Ashoka suffered from intense guilt and turned to Buddhism as he now coveted peace. From then on, he was committed to spreading Buddhism not just throughout his kingdom, but across the world. Listen as William and Anita discuss Buddhism’s transformation from a regional religion to one that spans nations. For bonus episodes, ad-free listening, reading lists, book discounts, a weekly newsletter, and a chat community. Sign up at https://empirepod.supportingcast.fm/ Pre-order William's book below: UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Golden-Road-Ancient-India-Transformed/dp/140886441X India: https://www.amazon.in/dp/140886441X/ Australia: Available 17th September 2024 US: Available Spring 2025 Waterstones edition: https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-golden-road/william-dalrymple/9781526681256 Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Assistant Producer: Anouska Lewis Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcasts, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Drimple. And this is a very exciting thing. If you missed the last episode, we have begged, cajoled, frankly, blackmailed, and I have a lot of material, William Darlenthal, to just give us a sneak pick. I really do. William Darymple is giving us a sneak peek of his fabulous new book, which is out in

September, called The Golden Road. And for you, Empire listeners, you lucky, lucky people, you get a little sneak peek of, I think it's fair to say a third, you know, a third of the book. We don't want to give everything away, but a third of the book of how, goodness gracious me, had it right and everything comes from India, Indian. The Sanjee Basque Memorial issue. He's not dead. Poor Sanji. He's very much alive and kicking.

Good his gracious me, memorial issue. And the last episode, just to recap, we were talking about the Buddha, the origin story, the superhero story, if you like, of the Buddha and then the spread of Buddhism. And we're going to continue in that vein. You sort of gave us a little tease about one of the greatest acolytes of the new religion, the new Buddhism, was a man who would take it further than anyone could possibly dream. And that man was the Emperor Ashoka. Now, just give us an idea of when he lived and what was going on in the world at that time.

So the Emperor Ashoka is one of the most extraordinary figures in ancient history. And over the course of this episode, we're going to tell you why. because at a time when every other great king is banging their chest and putting their feet over the necks of their conquered adversaries, as literally Darius was doing in those inscriptions at Behisdun that we saw in the Persian series, Ashoka, in an extraordinary way, sort of prefigures Gandhi. And he's all about nonviolence, about reconciliation, about peace and brotherhood. And so he's a very inspirational figure. And in fact, the emblems of Ashoka are to this day the emblems of the Republic of India. The dome of his stupa at Sanchi is on the top of Rastrapati Bavan, the old Viceroy's house built by Luchens. The Ashokan lions are the symbols of the Republic of India. And the images that he created haunt still the currency and the chakra at the center of the of the flag is a Buddhist chakra. Yes, the chakra, which many people describe as a spinning wheel, and some people sort of wrongly say, oh, is that gandhi spinning wheel?

But it's a lot older. It is the wheel of wisdom, which comes from Ashoka and Buddhism as well. And before that, the Vedas, as we saw before. So it's a profoundly ancient symbol. Anyway. So he was from the Morian dynasty. Now, who are the Morians? And what kind of era are we talking about?

When were the Morians around? So this connects with another. of our figures from the Persian series, when we followed Alexander the Great in his conquest from Thrace, from Greece, across Turkey, defeating the Akamonids, burning Persepolis, and then heading into what is now Afghanistan and towards India. And in the course of all that, the Macedonian troops come across a bunch of Indian ascetic summer food. seem to have been Buddhist. And we have extraordinary accounts of the meeting of these two very different worlds, a bunch of naked Indian holy men that the Greeks called gymnosophists, naked holy men,

and these Macedonian troops. And the Macedonians come and want, and, you know, being children of Aristotle, Alexander was literally Aristotle's pupil. The Greeks are longing to know what kind of sophistry, what kind of wisdom these guys have. And, you know, and, you know, And the Indians say they're not going to speak to them unless they take off their clothes and sit down. Oh, really? Seriously. Striple, we'll tell you nothing. You've got to take the lock off, they say.

Wow. So it's nudie wisdom. Newty wisdom or nothing. It did. It's like a nudist beach in Taxena. And there's a standoff and eventually the Greeks are led off the hook and they say, okay, the Greeks say it's far too hot to take your clothes off. We'll scorch our bottoms if we do that.

This is literally a first-hand account. May I just say, which in itself is wise? It's like a show's great Greek wisdom. Inside of Greek wisdom, exactly. But we have first-hand accounts in this extraordinary meeting from Alexander's Admiral Nyarkas. And he says, physically the Indians are slim. They are tall and much lighter in weight than other men. they wear earrings of ivory, at least the rich do, and they dye their beards. Some, the very

whitest of white, others, dark blue, red, purple or even green. They wear a tunic and throw an outer mantle over their shoulders. Another is wound around their head, and all except the very humblest carry parasols in summer. But what he's really interested in are the naked sophists, the gymnosophis, who the Greeks say were a mixture of brahmins and saramanus, which is the word for ascetics. And presumably they were either Jains or Buddhists. The Jains to this day have naked ascetics. The Diggumbarra, the Skyclad sect of Jains, wander around India. Skyclad. Yeah, they're called Skyclad. Is that gorgeous? Skyclad. I've never had that before. Yeah. Uh-huh. And if you go particularly to Gujarat or Kanataka, you quite often see completely

naked men just wandering through the bazaar with their begging bells and their little pots. Anyway, as I said, the gymnosophists laugh at the Greek's cloaks and knee-high boots and tell them to undress if they want to hear some words of wisdom. And the Greeks say, but the heat of the sun is so scorching that no one could bear to walk barefoot, especially at midday. So eventually they all sit down together and the senior guru starts questioning them about Socrates, Pythagoras and Diogenes, who are obviously the Greek equivalents. So have they heard of them? I mean, have they heard of these people in India? If the Indian aesthetic is asking about these, I suppose word is spread. It's not clear, but I think what they're asking is what do you have in Greece? Oh, who's your cleverest? What do your clever people say?

Okay, right, got it. And later, the gurus still naked dine at Alexander's table. And according to Nyakas, again, they ate their food while standing, balancing on one leg. But you still see that. Still see it today. Kedernat and Badronat, those guys in the Himalayas. with one leg or one arm in the air or not cutting their fingernails. And there was one in Kanpur who was called Mourniwaba.

I don't know if he's still alive, but never spoke, never spoke at all and just, you know, hand signals. But giving up one thing that makes you comfortably human is the sort of the link between all these aesthetics. And there's two results of this that we know from the strange meeting of the Macedonian soldiers and these Jain or Buddhist holy men. First of all, there is one of the gymnastophis, who the Greeks called Kalanis, who follows the troops and actually starts taking on Macedonian pupils until finally he becomes mortally ill in Sousa, back in Persia, and decides to throw himself on a ritual, fulial part to the amazement of the watching Greeks. Just burned himself to death.

God. Yeah. What? Burnt himself alive. Alive. Without a flicker of emotion, and the Greeks are very impressed by this. But even more amazing, and this is an extraordinary story, there is the tale. of what is probably the first Western Buddhist. Because among Alexander's soldiers, there is a guy

called Piro of Ellis, whose dates are apparently 360 to 270 BCE. And he fights with Alexander, and according to his later biographer, was so profoundly influenced by what they call the doctrines of the gymnosophis that on his return, he adopts a form of agnosticism and explains to his followers, that the only way to avoid unhappiness is to cultivate equanimity and suspension of judgment. And this, he says, would result in an undisturbed mental state, an inner and outer tranquility. I know, I know you're saying to me, I know what you're saying to me is that he's the first Western follower of Buddhism. All I'm hearing is the world's first hippie, because it's like literally peace and love, man. Well, that's more or less what happens he comes back.

He won't go home and go back to his mum and dad. He goes and sits in a tree. In a tree house. He adopts this sort of life of wandering and austerity, lives in solitude, avoids what he regards as pointless seduction of sensual pleasures. But even more remarkably, he's also the first Western yogi. He starts like the hippies with the boutique to also do yoga positions. And this is all relayed through Greek text.

we get a kind of Greek understanding of it. But according to his biographer, Piro of Ellis embraces a position of agnosticism, and according to one account, practices an early form of yoga, remaining in a single position unmoved all day long. And this, he says, gives you an undisturbed mental state

of deep, calm, peace, and inner and out of tranquility, free from suffering. There's a volume missing in that history. There is a volume of, Piro, the later he is, when he joins his dad's bank. There's a firm called Piro, Ellis and Glum.

Poor own Piro sitting there with his ledgers. Okay, all right. So I love Piro. I love the idea of Piero of Ellis. The name that comes up whenever I've been taught this stuff about ancient Indian history. And indeed, there was a soap opera that I was made to sit through all about this man. So this is Jandragup Tamoria, right? So is this the same sort of time as Jarnakir and stuff?

Is this all running into each other? This is exactly that sort of time. If Chalakia is a historic figure. Can I just say? So there's such passion for these figures. And William will tell you why in a minute. There was an East Ender's style soap opera that had about 670 billion episodes that my dad used to make me watch and say, learn something.

Learn something. So there we are. On you go. Tell us the true story, not the Indian soap opera version of Chandragut, Tenghis reign. Well, I haven't seen the Indian soap opera, so I don't know how accurate or not it was. But at the same time that Alexander's sitting in Taxila, which incidentally is the ruins are still there, you can go and see them just outside modern Islamabad in what's now Pakistan. At the same time as all that stuff with the gymnasophists and Piravelis doing his tie-dye, a young Indian warrior who has been at college at the university in Taxila comes and pledges his allegiance. to Alexander. And this is all recorded by Plutarch about 100 years later. And Plutarch says how he meets

this man, and this is Chandra Gupta Moria, the grandfather of Ashoka who will spread Buddhism. And we have one account from Delphi and another account from Central India, which said that Chandra Gupta, hero worshipped the Macedonian and actually joined Alexander's army and may be fought in that battle that we talked about in our Alexander episode on the Jellum. Wow. So he starts as a warrior then. I mean, his origin stories, he's a refugee who joins a foreign army, who learns a foreign way. I mean, that's fascinating. So the story, I think, is that he was an exile from Bihar, from Maghada, as it then was. And he's fallen out with the ruling dynasty and he goes to university in Taksena and happens to meet Alexander when Alexander's passing through. And he decides

to model himself on Alexander, and according to some accounts, he actually fights with Alexander against Porus. So as we know, after that battle, Alexander retreats, he goes back and dies of Babylon, possibly of poison, and Chandra Gupta takes over Bihar, the main heartlands of the Indo-Gagodgetic plains, the same area that the Buddha had lived 200 years earlier. And we get into marriage between the Morian dynasty in Bihar and the successors of Alexander. And we know about a alliance that takes place and the marriage of one of Chandragutta's sons with the daughter of Seleucus, who is the Greek that takes over Afghanistan, that becomes the Seleukid dynasty. And Chandri Gupta, according to this source, throws in a basket of

Indian Afrodisiacs, which he says would make the Greeks as rampanty. Andes birds. What's he thought for? It covers all bases, this alliance. You know, sort of beware Greeks bearing gifts, but whey, if the Indians are. Okay. Good. Good.

Very interesting. So then in another exchange, Chandra Gupta asks Seleuces' half Indian son Antiochus to send him all the things he can't get in India, which, like today, sweet wine, dried figs. and a sophist. They want a Greek philosopher. And Antiochus sends that he'll send him the wine and the figs, but the Greek laws forbade him from sending a sophist. Isn't interesting? Why? I'm not sure. What, sort of our wisdom's, our wisdom's too good for you. Our wisdom's too good for you? I don't know. That's really interesting. But you can have the wine and figs. I mean, I think they've got the better deal. But okay. So Chandragupta then. And the aphrodisiacs. He's a man of means. He's married into the right places. He's got the right connections, even though he doesn't have a Greek sophist to have. help him. What is the trajectory from being that man, you know, a sort of a glitzy, blingy, man who can throw baskets of aphrodisiacs at people to somebody who does become a monk and, you know, give up all of those trappings? So what's interesting is that Chandra Gupta is not a Buddhist. He is a Jain, which is the religion that the Buddha, in a sense, modeled himself against. He thought that the Jains were too ascetic, if you remember our last episode. We were saying how the Buddha

chose the middle way and rejected this extreme asceticism of the Jains. But Chandra Gupta takes it on and eventually he abdicates in 297 BCE becomes a Jain monk in Sravana Belagola. And to this day, there is a monastery on a hill in Srivana Belagola that I have been to with the wonderful early Jane Vihara and this sort of chakra. And this is the point allegedly where Chandra Gupta Moria starved himself to death in the Jane Manor committed Salikana, so escaping in his view the cycle of rebirth. Wow. Okay, so he just did this as a rite of passage, as a good Jane.

That's what he did. Or do we think that there's something happens in his life to make him repudiate everything that came before? There is this thing in Indic religions, whereby you have the different stages of life. Some people call it Sanyas, you go off and hermit yourself, yeah. And the Jain version of this, the high. highest form of it involves in the end doing this Salikana, which I've seen take place to this day when you starve yourself to death. Really, it still happens. Even now in India, people starve themselves

to death. It still happens. And in my book, Nine Lives, I open with the story of this nun I met at the same place, Ravana Bela Gola, the same place that Chandra Gupta, Morya went to die. And it's about 50 miles to the north, I think, of Bangalore. But anyway, a car drive from Bangalore. And it's still one of the major centres of the Jains. It has that fantastic statue of the naked Jane hero, Balubali, who stood so long in one place that the vines wind round and creep around his legs. And you see this in the statue. And this is the same place, sacred place, that Chandra Guptimori came to die, allegedly. So this obviously leaves a vacancy on the throne in Paliputra, the capital, and his son Bindasura takes over,

continues to have good relations with the Greeks who are in Afghanistan, and Chandra Gupta's grandson, Bindasura's son, Ashoka, is the young prince who becomes initially the viceroy in Taxila at the very place that Alexander met the gymnastophis. Oh, really? So he starts off as a viceroy. Oh, interesting. Oh, that's interesting.

So, I mean, we should say, I mean, Ashoka, I know you sort of have given us a little idea of just how important he is, to iconography in India again, but he is sort of the king of kings. He's meant to be the quintessential Indian ruler. You hear it even now, you know, the wisdom of Ishoka. It's sort of the Solomon of the Indian pantheon of royalty. You can't overestimate what a position he has in Indian history. Well, you can't. And one of the reasons you can't is that he is the first Indian whose voice survives for us in his. own words. The earliest inscriptions we have anywhere in India are those of Ashoka. And it's he who

carves the first script that we could actually read. There are earlier scripts from Indus Valley, which to this day haven't been translated, and no one knows what these strange symbols on the seals of merchants, probably representing bales of merchandise or something of that sort. But they haven't been translated. No one to this day can read it, but we can read the script of Ashoka, which was translated by James Pryncep in the 19th century. So, I mean, I have a question, and it's an important one. How is it that a man whose grandfather was such a Jane, such a true believing Jane, that he starves himself to death, supposedly? How is it that he becomes the vessel through which Buddhism is going to pour out over the world? Well, I think, A,

that's just an example of how India is this multi-religious place. Always, throughout its history, there's always been a great multiplicity of religious and philosophical ideas circulating in India. And that's as true of the time of Ashoka as any other. But we do actually have a particular conversion story. Ashoka is coming back to his capital city, Patli Putra. And there he meets a monk begging for arms in the capital. And he's described as a handsome young man of tranquil appearance who walks along the road like an elephant, fearless and endowed with the ornament of tranquility. And according to this source, which is a Sri Lankan source, it was the monk's fearlessness and calm charisma, as much as his preaching, that persuades Ashoka to formally convert to Buddhism.

And we should talk about Pataliputra, which under Ashoka grows to be. the largest city in the world. And we actually have fragments of a report by a Greek ambassador from the Salukids, who is called Megasinis. And he visits just before Ashoka's born, during the reign of Bindasutra or Chandra Gupta. And he says the city already covers 10 square miles and is surmounted by a 21-mile-long wall, broken by 64 gates and 570 towers. which means that it's about twice the size of early Rome and three times the size of Alexandria, and 11 times larger than Athens with a population of around 200,000. So this is a major capital city of a rich and urbanised society.

Okay. And also, I mean, it also sounds huge, but it also sounds like it is cosmopolitan. If you have a place that large, you're going to have a large military presence. If you have a large military presence, you're going to have a large diplomatic presence. if you've got a large diplomatic presence, you're going to have cultural contacts with other countries, so merchants are going to come in. So you're describing like a massive great quadrant. Yes, and there's the question,

given that we have this information about marriage alliances at the time of Chandra Gupta, if possibly Ashoka has a bit of Macedonian blood in his veins, not impossible. We don't know it for sure. See, people won't like you saying that, will they? Because the ones who are saying he's Indian, Indian, Indian, Indian, Indian, But it is, I mean, as you say, there are suggestions this may be so.

It's not proven and it's not certain, but it's certainly possibility. There was marriage alliances and so it's possible that Ashoka had some Macedonian blood. And it's almost certain that there would have been Greeks around in Patali Putra when Ashoka's growing up. Can we just for a second just say why that is such a contentious thing to say and why some people are going to be writing in Green Ink, angry Green Ink to you? Because some people believe so fervently down to. their bone marrow that this is an Indian, Indian, Indian, Indian, Indian, and they will

rile at the idea that there's any kind of Greek, Macedonian or European bloodline mixed in. Well, they might be right, and we don't know for sure. But it's certainly a possibility that he has some Macedonian blood because we know that his grandfather had a marriage allowance. We don't know who the princess was. We don't know if she had children, but it remains a possibility, no more than that. But I know you said, but what I'm saying is that for some people it's very important that there is sort of an Indian pride that reaches back to the beginning of the mists of time? Well, I think one of the things that's very clear is how cosmopolitan India always has been. If you look at the murals of the Ajanta Caves, which I was talking about in the last episode,

you see images there, which are the oldest paintings we have from India, of every sort of international trader turning up in India. India was a very rich place. and you see Persians, Medes, Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, guys with Phrygian caps, all sorts, turning up and trading in this place, and intermarrying and wanting to be part of this rich and powerful land. So I think, you know, it's a measure of India's greatness at this point that it has this international cast around its capital city, not a measure of its weakness. But you're right, there will be people that will not like the idea, yeah. They'll just say, yeah, they'll just say, stop trying to make our greatest hero less Indian. Anyway, anywho, I think, you know, you made the case.

So you've got this very cosmopolitan city of Ashoka, but it doesn't stop there because his empire grows and grows. And how far and how wide does it grow? So Chandragopta Moria has already conquered the Gandhetic heartlands. That's his granddad. That was his granddad, yeah. And Bindasura has added a little bit to it. But it seems to be a Shoka who makes the Morian Empire. extend to its furthest boundaries. And those boundaries are absolutely massive. They're bigger than any

other Indian Empire until the Mughals, who will be, what, 1,800 years later. And there are inscriptions from Ashoka as far north as Kandahar in Afghanistan and others as far south as the Karnataka-Tamalad border. So it encompasses not just most of the landmass of modern India, but also Pakistan and Afghanistan. Can I have questions? I have so many questions. Okay, so you don't get that much land by putting flowers in somebody's hair or giving them a boutique t-shirt. I mean, he must be a soldier with a retinue, an army, a ferocious warriors, to conquer these lands. What are his beliefs while he's conquering all these lands?

So we have various different accounts, depending on whose version you want to believe. and the Sri Lankan Chronicles have this image of Ashoka as this bloodthirsty war criminal almost at the beginning of his career. There's these stories about how he misbehaves as a viceroy, how he's cruel, how he runs a torture chamber, how he murders many of his brothers, how he comes to the throne through violence. And then he performs this Kalinga campaign that he attacks the Kalinga Kingdom, which is, modern ERISA on the east coast of India. And these are the great rivals of the Morians, that the other great power of the time. And this is the turning point for Ashoka, because not only does he wage an incredibly bloody war, not only does he win, but he then suffers a sort of incredible midlife crisis in the immediate aftermath of that victory.

Well, let's take a break here. Let's find out what that guilt trip turns into in the next part of Empire. Join us then. 150,000 people were deported, 100,000 were killed, and many times that number perished. On conquering Kalinga, the beloved of the gods Ashoka felt remorse,

for when an independent country is conquered, the slaughter, death and deportation of people is extremely grievous. All suffer violence, murder and separation from their loved ones, even those who are fortunate to have escaped, and whose love is undiminished by the brutalizing effects of war, suffer the misfortunes of their friends, colleagues and relatives.

This suffering is shared by all men and is considered profoundly painful by the emperor. Today, if a thousandth part of those people who died when Kalinga was annexed were to suffer similarly, it would weigh heavily on him. The inscription of Dharma has been engraved so that any sons or grandsons that aren't, may have, should not think of gaining new conquests. They should only think of conquests by Dharma to be a true conquest. And these are the words of Ashoka, the guilt trip made into words?

These are the words of Ashoka. These are among the earliest inscriptions that have survived from him. And what an extraordinary message. If you think of his contemporary Darius, who is, or Darius is a little bit earlier, a generation of two earlier, but Darius in our Persian series, we saw making also inscriptions on a mountainside, also recording his victories. But Darius is boasting, I am the king of kings. He said, look at me. And he actually has a picture of himself with his foot on the neck of his enemies, while his other enemies are bound with neck halters as slaves.

But what Ashoka is doing is something that even today, even in our space, In the United Times, almost no ruler ever does, which is saying, I got it wrong. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Two words you very rarely hear from those in power. From any ruler ever, least of all, any around at the moment in our country or indeed in the United States. And I mean, everything about these inscriptions, the oldest written first person statements in Indian history are utterly remarkable. There's not one Buddhist text. or inscription surviving in its original form from before this moment that Ashoka starts carving his first rock edict. Yet suddenly from this point, we have almost a waterfall of words cascading over the rock shelters and boulders and eventually the pillars of northern India, from Kandahar to the deck and giving us for the first time a ruler with a fully formed and rounded personality. So, I mean, when do you say rock edicts, are these, you know, meant for the

people to read and understand where he's coming from? Are there reminders for himself that he can't, you know, he's now put it into stone? It's written in stone so he can't change his mind. What is the purpose of having all of these rock edicts everywhere? So they raise as many questions as they answer. We can now read them. Thanks to James Pincep in the 19th century, reading the Karoshti and the Brahmi scripts and translating them. We can read these things. but the interpretations are still being chewed over by scholars to the state. So first of all, if you're inventing a script, who is actually reading these? Yeah, who's literate enough to read it?

I mean, exactly. Are you training up a set of scribes to make these inscriptions, in which case, are you also training up a laity to just, or a populist who can read it, or are these only for posterity and for the ruler's own ego? And there are several classes of these edicts. the earliest ones are on rocks, often in weird places, on hilltops or at crossroads, or at places where fairs or festivities seem to have been held and often are still held. So, you know, they're sacred places that are still sacred today.

And then you get later on the pillar edicts and you have this wonderful technology that we still don't completely understand, whereby Ashoka, possibly with Persian tutelage, but again, there's nothing quite like it in Persia, learns how to give this very glassy polish to sandstone, so much you can almost see yourself in the reflection. And these tall pillars are erected often with lions or Dharma Chakras on top. And these are distributed across India from rock inscriptions in Kandahar, in Afghanistan, from Mansera in Pakistan, right down to the Tamil-Karnatic south of India. And scholars again, you know, argue about almost everything, depending on their position. Some say this marks clearly the boundaries of a very, very powerful empire.

Some say that he, you know, is putting up his pillars with the agreement of client kings who are still ruling and denying that the Morians actually genuinely control in any meaningful sense. this enormous tract of land in a world that was very difficult to navigate with no good roads and so on. But the picture we have is of this extraordinary king who's going around. He says he's available to everybody. He talks about building roads. He talks about planting trees to shade the roads. He says, I'm available to my subjects at any time, anywhere.

And even this, you know, simple statement of personal grief, pain and repentance. Yeah. And I promise you my children won't do this. My grandchildren will not do what I've done. It's really, it is, it's bizarrely unusual. There's nothing like this anywhere else. And profoundly moving, I think. You know, he's a very remarkable figure.

Yeah. Okay. So how does this sort of, you know, sort of king hippie, if I can put it this way, who's peace and love and let's not, you know, spread any more hate, how does that then translate into somebody who will be the greatest exporter of Buddhism? Is that an active choice? on his part. It's an active choice, and we've got two sources. One is the Sri Lankan chronicles that tell their version of the story because Ashoka sends his son Mahinda to Sri Lanka. And we have

records from Anuradapura celebrating the places where Mahinda made these sermons, bringing the Buddhism of Ashoka to Sri Lanka. And I've also been this Christmas to a newly excavated archaeological cycle, Rajagala, in the centre of Sri Lanka. where there is a stupor, what in England we call a barrow. It's a burial mound to Mahinda with a Brahmi inscription from the same period, same sort of script as Ashoka's Brahmi inscriptions across India. So this seems to be a historical story, that Ashoka is not only converted to Buddhism, he becomes a missionary for the Buddhist faith. And spurred on by his guilt for the pain and misery and devastation. that he's caused. And inspired by this monk who's converted him, he starts to proclaim his new faith. And he says, in one inscription, more than two and a half years have passed since I became a Buddhist layman. But I was not zealous. Now, more than the years passed since I approached the Sangha, the Buddhist monastic community, and I have become much more ardent and committed. And Ashoka took it upon himself to spread this Buddhism that he believed in to the world.

And again, scholars are divided. There are some who believe that Buddhism was a very small local cult from the area around the capital and that it was a pure piece of good fortune that this monk happened to come into contact with the shoka. There are others who believe that Buddhism was fairly well established and probably had reached the Western Ghats and the coast above Bombay by this period. And scholars are arguing about this. But there's no question that Ashoka changes the history of Buddhism. forever, from being a relatively small cult among other cults, it becomes the principal religion for a period in India alongside the different Vedic and different forms of Hinduism. Also, I mean, there was something else that I read in the sneak peek of your brilliant book, which is about to hit the shelves and is going to be just magnificent. Please put your all pre-order in. You are very, very kind. No, not at all, but I genuinely have learned things, you know.

You know, one of the things that you've observed in this is that the Brahminical rulers or the Brahmin'cust frowned upon seafaring. They didn't think it was something that one should do. But the Buddhists, you know, that belief in Buddhism sort of sets you free to jump in boats and travel far and wide. I didn't know what was the Brahminical thinking about you will, thou shalt not get in a boat and sail away? So again, there are different, different understandings of this. there are very clear instructions in the laws of Manu, which are one of the basic Hindu law codes, and in the other Dharmas Shastras, the other law codes, that you should not cross the black waters. And there it is in black and white. There's no question that these commandments, so to speak,

are there. But there are other indications that people are traveling anyway. We have recent DNA evidence that shows that Indian traders are certainly landing up on the Mekong Delta, not necessarily Brahmins. In fact, there's positive DNA evidence that you're getting quite a lot of South Indian non-Brahman casts traveling initially to Southeast Asia. But in due course, large numbers of Brahmins do begin to come and travel across the water, particularly to Southeast Asia, bringing Hinduism with them. And this is a trajectory which results ultimately in Anka Wat. Angkor Wat, I was just thinking, yes, the ideas are powerful because, you know, they build

powerful iconography and buildings to them. And you get kind of two different trajectories in a sense of Indian influence at this period. You get the merchants who are often subscribing to Buddhism, and there's a very simple trade-off. They give gifts to the Buddhist monasteries, which allow the Buddhists to excavate their wonderful cave monasteries and build fantastic stupas and so on. And in return, the merchants get chalmic relief. They're forgiven their sins and a promise good rebirth. At the same time, you're getting the new Puranic Hinduism. I mean, you have to explain what piranic scriptures are for those who don't know.

What are the piranic scriptures? If you like, the fully developed Hinduism of the same sort of Hinduism that we get today, Temple Hinduism, which from the 4th, 5th and 6th centuries, CE are becoming very popular in Palava, southern India, but also in Southeast Asia. And there is gradually a feeling that Southeast Asia is turned into an extension of the Indian Holy Land. And by the seventh or eighth centuries, there's no question of there being a problem if you're a Brahmin traveling there because it's essentially become part of Holy India. It's the same passport, same visa. I mean, honestly, I don't think you may not have this to hand now, but for next time when we meet, could you try and do a calculation of just how many square miles this empire?

And we can call it an empire. It's an empire of ideas. I think you sort of mentioned that in the first episode. But just how many square miles it took up and we can compare it to things like the Roman Empire, because it's so. sounds vast. What's so impressive about it is this is not an empire created by armies going to Southeast Asia, going to Afghanistan, and putting down the local population and establishing garrisons. This is an idea which conquers by the power of its mythology, by the sophistication of its civilization, by the attractiveness of its mythologies. And so you get these, you know, the great epics like the

Mahabarad suddenly are being carved up the Mekong Delta. The Ramayana is on the walls of temples in Thailand and in Laos and in Vietnam. And this is an empire of the spirit, if you like. An empire of ideas built in the imagination. That's what's so extraordinary about it, that there's no military conquest. This is an empire that people are subscribing to by choice because they're attracted to it. So, I mean, he's got this idea. He wants to export this idea. but how does Ashoka manage to take his ideas? So let's say places like Sri Lanka, how does that work? So on these pillar inscriptions, which are 90% of the evidence we have for Ashoka,

so it's Ashoka's own words, which on one hand is very immediate. On the other hand, is his version of events. So we don't know, we have one person telling his story, and we have to deduce from archaeology and art history whether he's telling the truth. and Ashoka sends out missionaries, or rather what he calls Dharma ministers, which is just his word for missionaries, as far as we can tell, to the different countries. We know that he sends his son Mahinda southwards to Sri Lanka. We have Mahinda's own stupa on Rajagala in Sri Lanka, where he's buried with a Brahmi inscription saying it's him. But we also have this extraordinary claim in, I think, the Kandahar inscription, that he sends Dharma ministers spreading his Dharma. not only to modern Iran, Turkey, the Middle East, but as far as Sireni, which is modern Libria. So it's a really ambitious programme of propagation. And certainly in Buddhist mythology, Ashoka's remembered as this heroic character who breaks into the Buddha's stupor, finds the relics and builds no less than 84,000 stupas across his realms and beyond.

That's almost certainly a vast exaggeration. But we have archaeological evidence that, A, that the earlier stupas in Lombini are cut into during this period and the relics removed. And we have many other stupers such as Sanchi, the most famous Buddhist site in India, which we know were built by Ashoka at this period. So you have this impression of a king who acknowledges a new faith, decides to spread it. And then rather like the Emperor Akbar later in the Mughal period gives it his own spin. And by the end of his life, he's clearly meaning something slightly different when he talks about his Dharma to what the official Buddhist religion, he becomes so filled with his own sense of imperial mission that he believes that he could actually make up his own version of what is morally right and what is morally wrong. What does he do away with then? Do you know what the differences are between, you know, Ashoka Dharma and their first Buddhist Dharma?

They're clearly minor, minor details, but he's talking very much about his Dharma as well as the Buddha's Dharma. And the two are not necessarily exactly the same. And there's recently been a new biography of Ashoka by the Sri Lankan scholar Patrick Ollivell, who very much takes the view that by the end, Ashoka's, you know, spinning off in the sense on his own moral and religious. trajectory and that while the early inscriptions are very specifically the message of the Buddha, by the end, he's, you know, founding his own religion almost, which is an extraordinary thing. So, I mean, there's Sri Lankan exporting of his belief, his new religion, his Dharma, whatever, I mean, and very much through his own flesh and blood.

I mean, I'd love to know a little more about how Mahinda manages to spread the word without getting, you know, an axe through his head, because people don't normally like new ideas being presented to them, you know, on a plate if they have certain beliefs. So when we're trying to understand what's going on at this period, we have the pillar inscriptions. We also have archaeology and we have art history. They don't always tell the same stories. Sometimes they're at odds with each other. And in the case of Sri Lanka, we have a very clear account in the Mahavamsa, which is the great Sri Lankan chronicle, that Ashoka sends his son Mahinda to his ally, who's called Devanam Piatisa, the Raja of Sri Lanka,

who's already a friend of Ashoka. And he sends with him, with his children, the Buddha's collarbone, the Buddha's rice bowl, and a sprig from the Bodhi tree at Bodhaya, under which the Buddha received his enlightenment. And that tree is still there in Anuradipura today. You can go and sit under it as the Buddha sat under the original tree. I've sent him as collarbone. I mean, do we think it really was or just maybe was? No, I think there is every reason to think this could be real

because we have accounts of the Buddha's relics being treasured immediately after his death. We also have accounts of Ashoka breaking into those stupas where those relics were deposited and then distributing them around the globe. So as with all relics, you know, it's good. to keep a certain level of skepticism, but it's certainly not impossible that this could be the Buddha's collarbone. And I think today it's in candy. Don't they have the Buddhist tooth there too? There's a tooth temple, I think, which is from this. But as I say, archaeology doesn't always agree with this version of events. And we have on the hill of Rajagala a monastery which may predate

Ashoka, a Buddhist monastery, where Mahinda eventually was buried. And the earlier carbon dates that are now emerging from the new excavations at Rajagala indicates that perhaps there were already a few Buddhists at Tisa and at Rajagala in southern Sri Lanka when Ashoka sent his son to Sri Lanka. So this is, again, these are things that scholars can argue about. But the overall picture is very clear that this is the beginning of a process, which will now go on for a thousand years, whereby the export of Indian religion will lead to a wholesale export. of Indian civilization, because within religion is secreted a whole series of texts which assumes certain ideas of geography, which are represented by various inscriptions and scripts,

which then spread, which are written in Sanskrit, a language that spreads across Asia, which contain ideas of astronomy, astrology, cosmology, geography, which travel, if you like, you know, in the undercarriage of this religion and which then become rooted across the whole region. And what happens for the first time with Ashoka in 250 BC is repeated in Afghanistan, in Bakrera, in Uzbekistan to the north, spreads across into China by the sixth or seventh centuries. You're getting Buddhism as a majority religion in China. At the same time, you're getting ideas of Hindu kingship spreading through Laos, Cambodia, Burma, Vietnam, right up to the borders of China on that side.

Then these ideas being recopped and further exported to Korea and Japan. And in all these places, there is a complete menu or library, if you like, of Indian ideas, literature, language, scripts and learning, which comes with these religious ideas. So it isn't just a matter of some wholly and improving moral theories going out. With it comes a whole civilization. And that's the story which I'm trying to tell in this book, The Golden Road. Well, they're not trying to tell, have told spectacularly well. Join us next time when we'll get William to tell us a little bit more from his magnificent new book, which is out in September.

We continue with our story of Buddhism and its travel around the world. William, just tell us where you're taking us next. Just give us a little bit of a sneak peek. So what you had with the Shoka was Buddhism going to Sri Lanka and heading off towards the Middle East. But the really successful thrust is when Buddhism heads into Afghanistan. You get to see all those wonderful Gandharaan sculptures, the great Buddhas of Bamian and so on. The Bamians are no more. That sadly are no more. But many other Buddhas are still there. And then we will eventually, go as far as the Tang dynasty in China, when Buddhism briefly becomes the main state religion of China, briefly replaces Confucianism. And the final and most exciting moment is when Buddhist monks from

China begin to make the journey to the Holy Land of India to consult the great Buddhist universities of India, most famously Nalanda, which is the Oxbridge, the Harvard, the Nazar, of the 7th century Indic world. Oh, well, wonderful, wonderful. So look, as always, as friends of the show, if you are members of the Empire Club, you can hear the rest of this series right here, right now.

If you're not yet a friend of the show and you want to be, you can sign up on Apple Podcasts or go to EmpirePoduk.com and sign up there. Otherwise, you'll just wait for the regular episode to drop. One last thing before we go, you can pre-order your copies of the Golden Road, including the wonderful, unbelievably beautiful

Waterston's special edition this is available from today and you can find a link for that in the show notes and until we meet again it's goodbye from me Anita Arnand and goodbye from me William Durumple