REF:- BOOK “ASHOKA THE GREAT” AUTHOR: D.C.AHIR. (P-23 TO 27), BOLD LETTERS INDICATE HISTORIC SPEECH OF ASHOKA SOON AFTER TRIUMPH OF KALING WAR. TITLE:- A TURNING POINT RADICAL CHANGE IN LIFE OF THE EMPEROR ASHOKA THE GREAT, INDICATING IF MIND IS CHANGED, THE EFFECTS ARE PERMANENT FOR THE WELFARE AND HAPPINESS OF HUMAN BEING. Like his grandfather and father, Ashoka was initially an adherant of the orthodox Hindu faith, and the early years of his reign seem to have been spent in a manner typical of the monarchs of his time, in hunting, festive celebrations & triumphal processions to the different provinces of his empire, on which occasion he was often accompanied by a huge retinue of nobles, soldiers & the other usual attendants. How & by whom Ashoka was drawn to Buddhism is not very clear. But Buddhism is not very clear. But it seems most plausible that his queen from Vidisa, mother of Mahinda and Sanghamitta, was responsible for drawing Ashoka closer to Buddhism. As per tradition, the Vidisa queen did not go to Pataliputra but lived in Vidisa. This was apparently due to her religious outlook and devotion to the Buddhist shrine at Sanchi. When Mahinda went to see her mother before leaving for Ceylon she took him to the Cetiyagiri (Sanchi) shrine for blessing. Further, it seems plausible that her devotion to Lord Buddha was also instrumental in preparing the young minds of Mahinda and Sanghamitta for renouncing the world. During their childhood they must have accompanied their mother to the Sanchi shrine. Even Ashoka mioght have also accompanied his lovely queen on pilgrimage to these places while as Viceroy at Ujjain. Thus slowely but steadily Ashoka was attracted towards Buddism by his queen who was the daughter of a wealthy Buddhist merchant of Vidisa (modern Besnagar, Bhilsa) and was herself a devout Buddhist. She was popularly known as Devi because of her religious outlook. Another person who brought Ashoka’s conversion nearer was Nigrodha, posthumous son of his elder brother Sushima, whom Ashoka saw in yellow robes just at the age of nine. That Ashoka himself took interest in Buddhism prior to ascending the throne and becoming an emperor has since been confirmed by archaeological evidence also. When in1975 Bhopardikar and K.D.Bannerji explored the region between Shahganj and Retti in the budhani Tahsil of District Sehore, Madhya Pradesh, some forty-five rock-shelters were found by them. Besides several stupa complexes, habitation sites, two Ashokan inscriptions were also found near the villages Bayan and Pangoraria. There are also some caves with religious symbols, faded inscriptions and stone benches. In the caves and rockshelters near Pangoraria, symbols like tri-ratna, kalasa, swastika etc. are depicted in painting. The rock-shelters site, now known as Saru-Maru-ki Kothadi has two Ashokan inscriptions. These have been published by D.C. Sircar in his book entitled ‘AshokanStudies’. One of them is a version of the Minor Rock Edict I. Its introductory part says : The King named Priyadarsin (writes) to Kumar Samva from (his) march (of pilgrimage) to the Buddhist monastery at Upunitha or Opunitha in Manemadesa…. The second inscription records the visit of Piyadassi, as Maharajakumara (prince) to the site. In the light of this evidence, it can be said with some certainty that Ashoka while as a prince, and Viceroy of Avanti, modern Madhya Pradesh, with headquarters at Ujjain/Vidisa, took interest in the affairs of the Bikkhu-Sangha, and occasionally visited them also to enquire about their welfare. After Ashoka ascended the throne, he come in contact with the Venerable Moggaliputta Tiss (called Upagupta in Sanskrit Literature), and had long Dhamma discussions with him from time to time. Thus slowly but steadily he was drawn to the Buddha’s Teachings. Ashoka was finally and firmly comverted to Buddhism after winessing the misery and suffering unleashed by the Kalinga war. Ashoka’s change of heart thereafter was sudden and dramatic. It happened in about 261 BC on the day of Vijaya Dashmi. Since early morning, men, women and childred had been gathering in large numbers in the open maidan outside Pataliputra, modern Patna. They were in a hilarious mood as this was their first opportunity to welcome Emperor Ashoka after his victory in the Kalinga war. The city of Pataliputra wore a festive look with national flags flattering high in the sky all along the main highway leading to the place of the public meeting. There seemed nothing surprising in this exhibition of pomp and show by the metropolitan citizens of the Mauryan Empire. The victory in the Kalinga war was an achievement of which they could be justly proud. As a result of their ultimate victory, the people of Magadha had almost forgotten the troubles and turmoils through which they had to pass when the war was on. The Jawans, who had accomplished heroic deeds and were instrumental in annexing the Kalinga, were expecting high awards and rewards from the royalty for their valour and bravery shown in the battlefield. At last, Ashoka accompanied by the Buddhist Sage, Moggaliputta Tissa, arrived on the scene and the vast mass of humanity burst into cries of joy. When the King and the Venerable monk ascended the rostrum especially erected for the purpose, the public jubilation cooled down. And when Ashoka rose to deliver his address, all eyes turned towards him; there was pin-drop silence. The people thought that they were now going to get a pat from the royalty for their deeds of gallantry and supreme sacrifices. But they were disillusioned when the king started speaking in an entirely different tone. He said, “Brothers and Sisters after the victory in the Kalinga war we have assembled here today for the first time. Perhaps you have come here to celebrate the victory with high expectations. But, I …I am unable to celebrate this occasion in the way you might have liked. I am fully conscious of the hardships faced and the sacrifice3s made by all of you in turning the scales in our favour in the Kalinga operation you gave to government in the shape of men and material. I am, however, ashamed of the large scale destruction brought about by the Kalinga was. Venerable Moggaliputta Tissa has removed darkness from my eyes and illumined by mind. I have now fully realized that for the sake of self-glory, for the sake of territorial expansion and for the sake of humiliating others, it is a crime, a great crime indeed, to massacre thousands of men, women and children; to destroy and desolate the property of others, and to uproot a large number of people from their hearths and homes. It is such a crime which can never be pardoned. Just think of those mothers who have lost their dear sons; wives who have lost their husbands; and children who have lost their parents in the bloody battle of Kalinga. Will they be happy today ? No, certainly not. The horrible results of this mass ruination and untold misery have served as an eye-opener whose kind guidance I have found solace in the Teachings of the Compassionate Buddha.” Continuing, the Emperor said, “Bhagwan Buddha, as you know, traversed this very land of Magadha about 250 years ago. In His very first sermon, the Englightened One had laid stressed and impressed upon the people to live righteously in accordance with the Noble Eightfold Path. The Buddha toiled for forty-five years going from village to village, from town to town in the great motherland of ours for the benefit of the suffering humanity. It is rather a matter of disgrace for us that we did not adhere to the teachings of such a Great Sage and committed some mistakes also due to our folly. But now, I assure you that this will not happen again.” “Since the message of the Buddha stands for peace and universal brotherhood”, Ashoka declared with some force, “from to-day onward I shall prefer ‘Dhamma Vijaya’ to ‘Rajya Vijaya’. Henceforth, I shall endeavour to win the hearts of the people both inside and outside the borders of my empire, by persuasion and love instead of by the use of force and sword.” As is apparent, the large scale massacre in the Kalinga war deeply influenced the mind of Ashoka, and brought revolution in his character. With this event, his outlook both in his personal and public life, changed. Consequently, he not only sought solace in the sublime teachings of the Buddha but he also resolved to protect and preach the Buddhist Law of Peity (Dhamma). P-143 : ASHOKA RE-DISCOVERED Ashoka had written in the Seventh Pillar Edict that “this lithic record has been prepared for the purpose that it may last as long as the moon and the sun shall shine.” These prophetic words of the wise Ashoka proved true when, after centuries of darkness, light dawned on India’s past, in the eighteenth century, and the British Civil Servants started bringing to light its treasures hidden under dust and debris. The romantic story of the re-discovery of Ashoka began in 1750 when Padre Tieffenthalar discovered fragments of an inscription on the Delh-Meerut Pillar which now stands on the Ridge, near Delhi University, Delhi. In the same year, the Allahabad-Kosam (Kausambi) Pillar was also discovered. This was followed by the discovery of the Lauriya-Araraj (Radia) Pillar in 1784. In 1785, the Delhi-Topra Pillar at Firozshah Kotla, Delhi was discovered by Captain Polier. He presented some drawing of its inscription to Sir Willam Jones who had founded at Calcutta in 1784. the Asiatic Society of Bengal to collect, decipher and interpret the archaeological, ethnological, geological and zoological specimens discovered by its members. In 1801, Captain James Hoare published, for the first time in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, facsimiles of the Delhi-Topra Pillar inscription and a part of the Allahabad-Kosam Pillar inscription. This attracted the attention of the scholars, and attempts to decipher these inscriptions began in right earnest. In 1822, Major James Tod discovered the first Rock Edict at Girnar, sacred mountain near Junagadh in Gujarat. According to Smith, “It lay buried in dense forest and might never have come to light had not a local notable made a causeway through the jungle for the benefit of pilgrims to the hill, which is one of the most sacred places venerated by the Jains. The ancient town of Junagarh (Uparkot), in the peninsula of Kathiawar or Saurashtra, stands between the Girnar and Datar hills. The Sudarsana Lake constructed under the orders of Chandragupta Maurya and equipped with watercourses and sluices by Ashoka’s local representatives, filled the whole valley between the Uparkot rocks on the west and the inscription rock on the east. The rock, a nearly hemispherical mass of granite, therefore stood on the margin of the lake, which disappeared long since.The Fourteen Edicts are incised on the north-eastern face of the rock, the top being occupied by the valuable record of the Satrap Rudraman ( cir. A.D. 152) and the western face by the important inscriptions of Skandagupta’s governor ( A.D. 457). The edicts have suffered a good deal of injury.” Fourteen years later, in 1836, a second set of Fourteen Rock Edicts was discovered by M.A. Court, a French Officer in the service of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, at Shahbazgarhi in the Yusufzai subdivision of the Peshawar District of the North-West Frontier province. Here the Edicts were found inscribed on both the eastern and western faces of a mass of trap rock, 24 feet long and 10 feet high, which lies on the slope of a hill to the south-east of Peshawar. The year 1837 saw the discovery of a set of Fourteen Rock Edicts at Dhauligiri, near Bhubaneshwar, in Orissa by Lieutenant Kittoe who copied the inscription at a great rist to his life. Kittoe says that he arrived at Dhauli “before day-break and had to wait till it was light; for the two bear cubs which escaped him last year, when he killed the old bear, were now full grown and disputed the ground.” Dhauli is the place standing where Ashoka is said to have witnessed the Kaling war, and was over-taken by remorse on seeing the blood-shed caused by the war. By 1837, a number of inscriptions on rocks and pillars had been discovered in various parts of India, but no body knew either their contents or the name of their creator. No Indian scholar was competent enough to decipher the most ancient scholar was competent enough to decipher the most ancient inscriptions of India found on the rocks and pillars in more or less in a uniform pattern. Luckily, in that year the labours of James Prinsep, a high official of the India Mint, Calcutta, and Secretary of the Asiatic Society of Bangal (from 1832-1838) bore fruit. After several years of assiduous study and hard work, he succeeded in deciphering the Ashokan Lipi. He published in July 1837, facsimiles, phonetic transcriptions and English translation of the Delhi-Topra Pillar,Edict in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. As, however, till then the mane of the creator of these pillars was not known, James Prinsep entitled his first essay as “Interpretation of the Most Ancient of the Inscriptions on the Pillar called the Lat of Feroz Shah near Delhi, and of the Allahabad, Radha and Mattiah Pillar, or Lat, Inscriptions which Agree Therewith.” In 1838, Prinsep deciphered and published translation of the Girnar Rock Edict and the Dhauli Rock Edict. He also made a comparative study of both the inscriptions and found them identical in language and contents. Thus, James Prinsep, working almost single-handed made available just within a year the major portion of the Ashokan inscriptions then available. This was truly a Herculean task, and over-work affected Prinsep’s health. He fell ill, left India for his home in England in 1840, and died soon thereafter. The opening words of all the pillar and rock edicts were : “Se hevan Devanampiya” or “Thus spake the beloved of the gods.” Who was ‘Devanampiya’ still remained a mystery. Since there was no clue whtsoever about the name in Indian records, Prnsep was misled to believe that these pillars had been erected by King Devanampiya Tissa of Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Luckily, however, he was soon corrected by George Turnour of the Ceylon Pali chronicle of Sri Lanka, found that Ashoka is called as “Devanampiya” in the Mahavamsa. He thus rightly attributed the edicts to Ashoka. He thus rightly attributed the edicts to Ashoka. The deciphering of the inscriptions, and the identification of their creator with Ashoka, the First Buddhist Emperor of India, was an epoch-making event. It enriched the history of India and of Buddhism to such an extent that all history books had to be re-written. In 1840, the Bhabru Edict of Ashoka was discovered by chance by Captain Burt. It was found inscribed on a detached boulder on the top of the Bijak Pahar on the back of the town of Bharat on the Delhi-Jaipur road, lying 41 miles north of Jaipur and 8 miles and a half east of a camping station at Bhabru. This detached inscription is now preserved in the library of the Asiatic Society of bangal, Calcutta. The Bhabru Edict transcribed and translated by Captain Kittoe with the help of Pandit Kamala Kanta. Since in this Edict, Ashoka specifically mentions his faith in the Bu8ddha, the bhamma and Sangha; lists seven Buddhist Texts to be studied by the Buddhist monks and laymen, and goes on to say that “whatever has been said by Lord Buddha all that is well said.” (Bhagavat Dudhena bhasite save se subhasite), this edict forms one of the most vital documents for the history of Buddhism and Ashoka. In1840 again, the Shahbuzgarhi Rock Edict was copied by C. Mason by going to the spot through a perilous region at considerable personal risk. Its copies were examined in Europe by Norris, who first read in them the word Devanampiyasa written in Kharosthi script. Ten years later, in 1850, another Major Rock Edict was discovered at Jaugada in Ganjam District, Orissa, and copied by Sir Walter Elliot who recognized it as another version of the Ashokan Edict discovered at Dhauli, Girnar and Shabazgarhi. In 1860was discovered another version of the Fourteen Rock Edicts by Forrest at Kalsi, near Dehradun. “The record is incised on the south-eastern face of a white quartz boulder shaped like the frustum of a pyramid, about 10 feet in diameter at the base and6 feet at top which stands at the foot of the upper two terraces over-looking the junction of the Jamuna and Tons rivers.” When found, its whole surface was “encrusted with the dark moss of ages.” In 1871 was discovered the Rupnath Minor Rock Edict in Jabalpur District, Madhya Pradesh. It was placed “in a singularly wild and out of the way glen, a perfect chos of rocks and pools overshadowed by rugged precipices fifty to sixty feet high, in whose clefts and caverns wild beasts find a queit refuge. In fact, while Counens was taking a photograph, he was being watched by a panther crouching less than twenty yards away.” In 18712 Carlleyle discovered the Barat Minor Rock Edict. It was founded engraved on the lower part of the southern face of a huge block of volcanic rock at the foot of the :’pandus’ hill close to the ancient town of Bairat near Jaipur in Rajastan. The advent of Sir Alexander Cunningham accelerated the discovery and restoration of the archaeological sites in India. In 1861, the Government of India appointed him as the first Director General of the Archaeological material opened a new vista in the study of Indian Archaeology. He himself went round; visited all the ancient sites; and prepared a systematic geographical map of ancient India. In his monumental work ‘Ancient Geography of India, Part I, the Buddhist Period’, Cunningham recapitulated the glorious history of the Buddhist remains and monuments scattered all over the country. The Ashokan inscriptions also received Cunningham’s proper attention as it was he who in 1877 published all the then known inscriptions in one volume titled ‘Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum.’ In this volume all the inscriptions were presented in facsimile, phonetic transliteration and English translation. In 1882, a fragment of an Ashokan Rock Edict was discovered at Sopara in Thana District Maharashtra by Bhagwan Lal Indraji. The Mansehra Rock Edict (in Hazara District, Pakisthan) was discovered by Captain Leigh in 1889. In 1891, the three Minor Rock Edict were discovered near Mysore in Karnataka by Lewis Rice. The Nigliva Pillar Edict in Nepal was discovered by Fuhrer in1895, Next year, in 1896, he discovered the Ashoka Pillar Edict at Lumbini, the birth-place of the Buddha.The inscription thereon that Ashoka had visited that place twenty years after his coronation as a pilgrim and that the Buddha was born at that very spot confirmed once for all the authenticity of that historic site. In 1904-5, F.C.Ortel undertook major excavation work at Sarnath. He exposed the main shrine, found the Ashokan Pillar and its Lion Capital, and unearthed a large number of sculptures and inscriptions. The Sarnath lion Capital is now the National Emblem of India. The discovery in 1915 of the Maski Rock Edict by C. Beadon, a gold-mining engineer of the Nizam’s Government, proved of great historical value as in it for the first time the name of “Ashoka, Beloved of the Gods” was found; thus setting at rest all doubts about the Creator of the marvelous rock and pillar edicts found all over India. Yet another set of Fourteen Rock Edicts was discovered in 1929 at Yerragudi in Kurnool District of Andhra Pradesh. Also discovered at Yerragudi were the two Minor Rock Edicts. Then followed the discovery of the two Minor Rock Edicts at Govimath and Palkigundu in the Raichur District of Andhra Pradesh in1931. The forst discovery after independence was a set of Minor Rock Edicts at Rajula-Mandagiri in Raichur was a set of Minor Rock Edicts at Rajula-Madagiri in Raichur District in 1953. In 1954, a Minor Rock Edict was discovered at Gujarra in the Datia District, Madhya Pradesh. It was followed by the discovery of the same Minor Rock Edict at Ahraura in Uttar Pradesh in 1961; at Bahapur, near Srinivaspuri, New Delhi in 1966. The Ashokan Rock Edict in the capital of modern India was noticed per chance in March 1966 by Jang Bahadur Singh, a contractor, when it was about to be blasted away for the development of a colony. It lies on the top of a little hillock to the south-east of Delhi at Bahapur, to the south of Srinivaspuri and west of the modern Kalkaji Temple. The year 1975 saw an outstanding discovery of a set of Ashokan Minor Rock Edicts at Pungararia, Budhani Tehsil in Sehore district of Madhya Pradesh. This discovery was made by B.P. Bopardikar of the prej-history branch of the Anthropological Survey of India, assisted by P.R.K.Prasad and Nambi Raju, while the party was exploring pre-historic caves and other sites on the southern fringes of the Vindhyan hills, overlooking the Narmada river. In his famous work,”Indian Archaeology Today” (1979), H.D.Sankalia records, “only three years ago an inscription early Brahmi characters was found engraved on a rock on the top of sandstone hillock or range of Vindhyan hills, near Bhopal. Careful investigation by a young assistant in the Archaeological Survey of India(ASI) and his enthusiastic colleagues also traced the remains of several stupas, made just with naturally flaked sandstone slabs, and rock-cut viharas. “Besides these rubble-made stupas, was found an inscribed rilic of the 2nd century B.C. More important were two Ashokan edicts. Though these rank among the Minor Edicts, they supply some new information. In the first place the edicts make specific mention of the emperor’s name as ‘Priyadarsi nama Raja’.”Ashoka” was his assumed name. “Further the edict also mentions the name of a son of Ashoka called Kumara Samba, and also refers to a Vihara named called Upalisa. This probably was the name of the Buddhist establishment on the hill.” A new set of Ashokan rock edict was discovered in Karnataka in August 1977 K.V. Rao of the Anthropological Survey and a team of the Karnataka University scholars. The edicts discovered are on two boulders on the Sukradatta hill near Nittur in the Bellary district of Karnataka. Yet another Minor Rock Edict of Ashoka was discovered in 1978 at Udegolam in the same Bellary district of Karnataka. The latest Ashokan rock edict to be discovered is at Sannati in Gulbarga district of Karnataka. This fragmentary rock edict was discovered in January1989 by the staff of the Archaeological Survey of India, Hyderabad Circle of the backside of the granite stone slab which was used as a pitha (base) for fixing up an image of mahakali in the ruined Kalikamba shrine in the Chandralamba temple complex build during the eighth or ninth century A.D. The slab contains a major part of Saparate Rock Edict II and also a very fragmentary portion of Separate Rock content and style to the Kalinga Rock Edict in Orissa wherein Ashoka endeavours to pacify the people conquered by him, and goes onto say that “all men are my children”. How amazing that even after 250 years of the first discovery in 1750, Ashokan Edicts are still being discovered in unknown places, thus adding more and more to lour knowledge about Ashoka and his glorious deeds. The story of the translation of the Edicts of Ashoka is as romantic as their discovery. As we have seen, the Ashokan inscriptions were first of all translated in any modern language by James Prinsep in 1837. His translation in English was later improved by other scholars. In 1877, Alexander Cunningham published, a comprehensive work on the Ashokan inscriptions under the title ‘Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum.’ In this volume, all the inscriptions then known were presented facsimile, phonetic transliteration and English translation. This work was criticized by E. Senart in 1879, who subsequently prepared a new edition in two volumes, les inscriptions de Piyadasi, paris, 1881-86. The pioneer Corpus of Cunningham was revised and re-edited by E. Hultzsch and published as The Inscription of Ashoka (Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum, Vol I), Oxford,1925. This volume has remained a standard edition for the text of the Edicts of Ashoka. Having regard to the importance of the Ashokan Edicts of Ashoka, many scholars have laboured on them and translated the same. As is natural in such cases, there are slight variations in their translations. For example, we quote here just two passages from the text of the Edicts and the translation thereof by three scholars in each case: (A) In Rock Edict XI, Shahbazgarhi text, Ashoka says : “so thatha karatam ialoka cha aradheti paratra cha tena dharma-danena.” J. Prinsep, (1837) translates it as – “And who so doeth this is blessed of the inhabitants of this world; and in the next world endless moral merit resulteth from such religious charity.” R.K.Mookerji (1928) translates this passage as – “Thus doing, one gains this world while infinite marit occurs in the world beyond by this dharma-dana.” And Romila Thapar (1961) translates thios passage as – “By doing so, there is gain in this world, and in the next is infinite merit, through the gift of Dhamma.” (B) In Edict No. VII on the Delhi-Topra Pillar, Ashoka says : “tata chu luhu se dhamma-niyame nijhatia va bhuya dhamma-niyame chu kho esa ye me iyam kate imani cha imani jatani avadhiyni amani pi chu bahukani dhamma-niyame yahi me katani nijhatiya va chu bhuye menisaham dhamm-vadhi vadhita avihimsaye bhutanam.” E. Senart (1881) translates this passage as follows : “Progress in Dharma may be obtained in two manners –by formal rules and by the feelings that they help to arouse in the heart. In this double influence the first has a very inferior vilue, the inner quickening is what is really important.” V.A.Smith (1920) translaters the same para as follows : “Among men, however, when the aforesaid growth of piety has grown, it has been effected by two-fold means, to wit, by regulations of the Law of Piety and by reflection. Of these two, however, regulations of the Law are of small account, whereas reflection is superior.” And D.C.Sircar (1957) translates it like this : “This progress of Dharma (Dhamma) among men has been promoted by me only in two ways, viz. by imposing restrictions in accordance with the principles of Dhamma and by exhortion. But of these two, the restrictions relating to Dhamma are of little consequence. By exhortion, however, Dhamma has been promoted considerably.” The lplendour of Pataliputra, modern Patna, the capital city of the Maurya Empire is well-known. According to Megasthenes, about BC 300, the city was, a long parallelogram about nine miles in length and about two miles in breadth. It wa thus dirded with a wooden wall,m pierced with loopholes for the discharge of arrows. It had a ditch in front for defence and for receiving klthe sewage of jthe city. This ditch which encompassed it (the city) all around’ was six hundred feet in breadth and thirty cubits in depth, and the wall was crowned with 570 towers and had 64 gates. Ashoka added a magnificent palace and many other building, among them being the Great Stupa to enshrine the relics of the Buddha, which further enhanced the prestige of Pataliputra. When in the first decade of the fifth century AD, Fa-hian, the first Chinese pilgrim, visited Pataliptra, the Ashokan palace was still standing. Fa-hian was so much impressed by the grandeur of the Ashokan palace that he ascribed its building to a supernatural agency. He says: The king’s palace in the city, with its various halls, all built by spirits who piled up stones, constructed wall and gates, carved designs engraved and inlaid, after no human fashion, is still in existence.” During the next two centuries, Pataliputra witnessed a rapid change for the worse, and by the time Hieuen Tsang, the second Chinese pilgrim, visited Pataliputra in 635 AD, he found the city and its buildings a mass of crumbling ruins and ‘long deserted’ though he notes that “the sangharamas, deva temples and stupas, which lie in ruins, may be counted by hundre3ds. There are only two or three remaing (entire).” Finally, when the Muslims over-ran Magadha in the twelfth century, whatever little was still standing, crumbled, and in the following centuries even the very site of the Maurya capital was forgotton. The excavations by the archaeologists at Patna have revealed that Ashoka’s palace was indeed a vast complex of building. According to L.A.Wadell : “aAlthough the precise boundaries of these great palace cannot yet be defined with any certainty, owing to the want of inscribed record in situ, and there being little on the surface to indicate the ruins underneath; still from the fact that we have found several fixed points (notably ‘the five relic stupas and moulds of ruins’ immediately to the north of these) and some of the actual monuments( the great stupa, portions of the two old stone railings, the Ashoka-pillar, and etc). We may from these and the general topography provisionally considered that the palace stretched from Chooti Pahar to Kumarahar with a north-west extension through Bulandhi, Sandalpur, Bahadurpur, ven as far as Pirthipur, and that the ruins on which the ‘Dargah’ now stands probably represents a detached northern portion of the palace and its surrounding buildings and grounds an area of four square miles, with somewhat sinuous outline towards the south, bordering the old channels of the river Son. For, what must have been one of the principal of these monuments, namely, the great stupa is only about 200 yards from the western end of this high brick embankment and it must have been visited by thousands of people every day from Pataliputra bringing offerings of flowers as at the very similarly sized stupa at Rangoon, the Shwe-Dagon.” The ruins of the part of the renowned ancient Pataliputra can be seen at Kumrahar, the site of excavations about seven kilometers from patna Railway Station. The most important building to be seen here is the huge pillars hall of the Ashokan period. The pillars are made of polished sand stone. Besides it, there are the remnants of first stupa built by Ashoka to enshrine the relics of the Buddha, monasteries, hospital and other buildings. (Concludes)
Posted on: Wed, 12 Mar 2014 18:39:04 +0000
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