Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c11.s27.4

c11.s27.4

the period, and then, being convinced that Bauddha monks who meditated on the death of hundreds of beings could not be pleasure seekers, he became one of them himself. Later, Aśoka ordered all the *nirgranthas* (also called Ājīvakas *Div.* p. 427) of Puṇḍravardhana to be beheaded, offering reward to those who did so, because they had painted the Buddha as prostrating before a *nirgrantha* image: Vitāśoka also fell a victim to this persecution as he was mistaken for a *nirgrantha*: in his grief at this occurrence, Aśoka allowed himself to be persuaded to declare immunity from fear for all creatures in his realms. This story is clearly a clumsy invention meant to account for the well-known fact that Aśoka promoted *ahiṃsā*. The celebrated story of Kuṇāla losing his eyes by the machination of his step-mother Tiṣyarakṣitā whose illicit passion for him he failed to reciprocate, and his miraculous recovery, is also a legend: the revenge of ‘women whose love is scorned’ is a popular motif (Penzer, *Ocean of Story*, ii. p. 120) and the name of the woman ‘Protected by Tiṣya’ is suspicious, for Tiṣya we have good reason to think was the asterism of Aśoka's birth or *abhiṣeka* (*JRAS* 1909 pp. 28—34). If this is accepted, Tiṣyarakṣitā's jealousy of the bodhi tree, her attempted destruction of it and its effects on the king, and the revival of both would also be mythical though some of the scenes are known to be represented in sculpture on the *toraṇas* of Sāñchī. (*Monuments of Sāñchi*, Marshall and Foucher pp. 212—3). Aśoka's gift of everything he had including the whole earth to the Sangha to make up the 100 crores he had promised, the concern of Sampadi, the heir-apparent, and the ministers at this extravagance, and the steps they took to stop the effects of Aśoka's dotage, and his last gift of half a myrobalan which was all that was left to him to the Kukuṭārāma—are likewise legends of pious fame.