The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c29.20

v1.c29.20

The whole duration of Açoka’s rule was, according to the concurrent testimony of the Brāhman and Buddhist historians, 36–37 years, reckoned, no doubt, from his accession. He himself makes mention of his brothers and sisters¹, a sufficient refutation of the legend that at his accession he began his reign by putting to death all the hundred other sons of Bindusāra. His elder brother, known in northern literature as Susīma, and in Pāli books as Sumana, doubtless did incur the fate of a vanquished rival: and it is to the son of Susīma, by name Nigrodha, that the king's conversion to Buddhism is ascribed². A full brother, Tissa, plays a considerable part in the Pāli story. He is said to have been for a time viceroy, and to have joined the Buddhist order, along with Agni-Brahmā, husband of Saṅghamitrā, in the fourth year after Açoka's coronation. A Chief Queen and her sons, no doubt the princes referred to as viceroys in Taxila and Ujjain, are mentioned in the edicts³, as also are the second queen Kāruvākī and her son Tīvara. The Chief Queen, in the Ceylon records named Asandhimitrā, may possibly have been the heroine of Açoka's youthful romance as Viceroy of Ujjain, the lovely maiden named Devī, of Vedisā (Vidiçā, the modern Bhīlsa), mother of Mahendra and Saṅghamitrā⁴. Another romance is connected with the name of Tishyarakshitā, represented as an attendant upon Asandhimitrā and Chief Queen of Açoka's later years, who, enacting the part of Potiphar's wife, is stated to have occasioned the blinding of the emperor's eldest son and heir, Kuṇāla, Viceroy of Taxila, and in a still later legend founder of the Buddhist dynasty of Khotan in Chinese Turkestān. The jealousy of Tishyarakshitā is said to have been aroused also by Açoka's devotion to the sacred Banyan tree at Gayā, under which the son of Çuddhodana had attained to Perfect Enlightenment. And thus on the Sānchī *stūpa*, where we find carved the propitiatory procession to the tree, by which the threatened mischief was appeased⁵, we have an actual first or second century representation in art, though by no means a portrait, of the great propagator of the Buddhist faith and morals and the imperially lavish founder of its shrines.