The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c29.65

v1.c29.65

The moral exhortations which Açoka most frequently addresses to his people refer to the practice of simple virtues, namely proper treatment of slaves and servants, obedience to father and mother, generosity and respect to friends, companions, relations, ascetics, and Brāhmans, abstinence from cruelty to living creatures. For this imperial insistence upon such obvious duties we are right to demand some explanation; and we may perhaps find an explanation in his statement that there had been during a long period a deterioration in these respects³. Not to attribute to Açoka the character merely of a retrospective pessimism, we may think of the social and other changes which might naturally accompany the growth of a great empire, the succession of dynastic tragedies, the subjugation of small states, the Greek invasion, and the initiation of numerous sects. And, apart from the general responsibility of a paternal rule, he might have found even in the Arthaçāstra (19, p. 47) the principle that the royal authority should ensure the observance of proper discipline in the household, an obligation which even the modern state does not decline. As regards the aged and the poor, who are placed under the care of religious officials⁴, we have seen that—in the absence of a 'poor law'—the care of such was a traditional obligation of royalty (*v. sup.* p. 487). These primary admonitions recur also in the latest of the edicts, as they had been prominent, along with the appeal for energy and mutual exhortation, in the earliest. But we hear also from the beginning of piety—friendship in piety, liberality in piety, kinship in piety—concord and the growth of sects in essential matters, in a word of religion, *dharma*, as something more than *çīla*, 'morality.' It was to be expected that with advancing years the religious feeling should acquire a stronger hold; whence we are not surprised to find in the later edicts a special exhortation to self-examination and the view that the chief thing is personal adherence to a man's adopted faith. In a country where during later ages the ecstatic, metaphysical, and fanciful aspects of religion have predominated, the sober Buddhist piety revealed in the edicts (and not uncommonly evidenced in the literature of Buddhism, both of the Great and Little Vehicles) deserves remark.