Buddhist India c19.9

c19.9

It may be asked, perhaps, why we do not try to save the intellectual effort necessary to balance probabilities in later accounts that cannot be entirely trusted, by confining ourselves exclusively to the contemporary documents, the inscriptions? The answer is that such a method would be absurd; it would not even save trouble. The inscriptions are scanty. The text of all of them together would barely occupy a score of these pages. They give only a limited view of the set of circumstances they deal with. Royal proclamations, and official statements, are not usually regarded as telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. To put it mildly, there is an economy of candour in these documents, intensely interesting though they are. And they are enigmatic. It is not possible to understand them without the light thrown upon them by the later accounts. It would only add to their difficulty to reject, for instance, the identification of the Piyadassi of the inscriptions with the Asoka of the literature, or the fact of his relationship to Chandragupta, or of his capital having been at Pāṭaliputra, or any other of the numerous side-lights to be drawn from the Chronicles. As M. Senart says: