Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c11.s38: The successors of Aśoka

Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c11.s38

Language: English

The successors of Aśoka

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An impenetrable obscurity settles on the Mauryan empire after the reign of Aśoka. The only certainty is that the great empire founded by Chandragupta and extended and maintained in all its splendour by his son and grandson, did not long survive in its itegrity. Tivara, the only son of Aśoka named in his inscriptions, is not heard of again, and must be presumed to have predeceased his father. The Purāṇas, the Avadānas, and the Jaina accounts have different tales to tell, and later writers like Kalhaṇa of Kashmir and Tāranāth of Tibet give their own versions of what happened. There is no means of reconciling these divergent accounts except to assume that the empire was in some manner divided among the surviving sons of Aśoka, and that each of our sources preserves the story of that part of the empire with which it was concerned. A continuous history of the Mauryan empire after Aśoka is, in the present state of knowledge, out of the question ; all we can do is to reproduce the lists of monarchs with the periods of their rule found in the authorities, and note what we know of them.¹

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¹ For Purāṇa Texts—Pargiter, *Dynasties of the Kali Age*, pp. 27-30 ; Div. ed. Cowell and Neil (1886) p. 430 ; Tāranāth, *History of Buddhism*, trans. Schiefner pp. 48 ff.

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² Mentioned only in some lists.

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Though the Purāṇas generally agree in stating that altogether nine Mauryas ruled for a period of 137 years, none of the lists gives details corresponding to these total figures which refer presumably to Magadha and the eastern half of the empire. The only name in these lists confirmed by epigraphy is that of Daśaratha who is ignored in the Buddhist and Jain accounts ; he is known by three short dedicatory inscriptions bestowing on the Ājīvakas caves in the Nāgārjuni hills immediately after his abhisheka (coronation) ; the script and the style of these records closely resemble those of the similar inscriptions of Aśoka in the neighbouring Barābar hills¹. For the rest we have only tradition ; though it is possible that tradition preserves the memory of what has been lost to history, perhaps for ever.

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¹ IA. 1891 pp. 361 ff.

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Sampadi or Samprati is well known both in Buddhist and Jaina literature. According to the *Divyāvadāna* he was the son of Kunāla and was established on the throne of Magadha by the ministers of state under strange circumstances ; Aśoka had promised a hundred crores to the Saṅgha of which he had paid only ninety-six crores by the end of his reign ; so he handed the kingdom over to them in lieu of the balance of four crores. The ministers managed to raise this money, pay it to the Saṅgha, and thus redeem the kingdom over which they set Samprati². The Jaina accounts also make Samprati the immediate successor of Aśoka, and say that after his conversion to Jainism by Suhastin he did for Jainism nearly everything that Aśoka did for Buddhism, such as building temples and endowing them liberally and spreading the faith even in non-Aryan lands. Though Pāṭaliputra is mentioned as the seat of his government in some accounts, others, with greater probability, make him ruler of Ujjain³. If Samprati was a grandson of Aśoka ruling from from Ujjain, Daśaratha was perhaps another who held sway at Pāṭaliputra. Whether Bandhupālita (Vāyu) and Vigatāśoka (Tāranāth) were alternative names of Samprati, or those of his brothers, is not easily ascertained.

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² Div. *ibid* ; earlier in the same story, we are told that Samprati and his ministers took steps to prevent Aśoka fulfilling his promise to the Saṅgha to the detriment of his kingdom and his subjects.

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³ Bom. Gaz. I. i. pp. 14-5.

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Kalhaṇa, the historian of Kashmir, as we have seen⁴, reproduces from earlier accounts the story of Jalauka, a son of Aśoka, and his successor in Kashmir ; Jalauka is said to have freed his country from an invasion of *mlecchas* (Greeks?) and extended his dominions as far as Kanauj ; he was also a great patron of Śaivism.

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⁴ Ante, p. 219.

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Śāliśūka is a name attested not only by the Vāyu and Viṣṇu Purāṇas but by the ‘Yugapurāṇa’ section of the *Gārgi Saṃhitā* where he is said to have done much to further the cause of Jainism even by the use of force.

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Tāranātha's Virasena, said to have been ruling in Gandhāra, must have been related to Subhāgasena with whom Antiochus the Great of Syria renewed his friendship about 206 B. C. Polybius says of Antiochus¹: ‘Crossing the Caucasus he descended into India and renewed his alliance with Sophagasenus the Indian king. Here he procured more elephants, so that his total force of them amounted now to hundred-and-fifty, and after a further distribution of corn to his troops, set out himself with his army, leaving Androsthenes of Cyzicus to collect the treasure which the king had agreed to pay.’ Clearly this was a renewal of the friendly relations that had prevailed between the Seleucids and the Mauryas since the days of the founders of both lines ; as usual the Greek monarch asked for and obtained some elephants for his army from the Indian ruler. Subhāgasena may well have been a Maurya².

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¹ *Histories*, xi. 39, Vol. IV p. 303 (Loeb classical library Tr. by W. R. Paton).

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² Cf. H. C. Raychaudhuri *Political History* (4) pp. 300-1 ; Tarn, *The Greeks in Bactria and India* pp. 130 and 154.

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The Divyāvadāna is clearly wrong in including Pushyamitra among the Mauryas. By all other accounts, he was the first of the Śuṅgas who rose to power first as the commander-in-chief of the forces of Bṛhadratha, the last of the successors of Aśoka. In his Harsha-charitra, Bāṇa finds occasion to introduce a calendar of treacherous assassinations, and there occurs the statement : ‘The wicked generalissimo Pushpamitra crushed his master, the Mauryan Bṛhadratha, who had little sense, and to whom the general pretended to show the whole army in a review’. Likewise, the Vishnu Purāṇa says : ‘Pushyamitra the commander-in-chief will uproot Bṛhadratha and will rule the kingdom as king 36 years’³. The fall of Bṛhadratha must be taken to mark the end of the Mauryan empire as such; it occurred about 185 B. C.

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³ The reading ‘Pratijñādurbalam’ for ‘prajñā-durbalam’ in Bāṇa's sentence, (H.C. Bombay N. S. Press 1897, pp. 198-9) and the far-reaching theories based on it (See Smith EHI (4) p. 208 n. 1) seem to me altogether unwarranted. For V. P. see Pargiter *op. cit.* pp. 31 and 70.

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Pushyamitra was doubtless a Brahmin; the Chetas of Kalinga and the Sātavāhanas who succeeded the Mauryas in other portions of the empire are also held to have been Brahmins¹. The argument has been advanced that the fall of the Mauryan empire was largely the result of a Brahminical reaction against the pro-Buddhist policy of Aśoka, and possibly the pro-Jaina policy of some of his successors. Our account of Aśoka's reign has shown that far from being narrowly Buddhist in its character, that emperor's religious policy deliberately aimed at universal tolerance and amity among all the religious sects ; the Brāhmaṇas were, if anything, selected for being honoured equally with the Śramaṇas, and there is no reason to believe that Aśoka was animated by an anti-Brahmanical bias to any degree. In fact we have little definite knowledge of what actually happened after the close of Aśoka's rule, and Pushyamitra, the Chetas and the Sātavāhanas are too far removed from the reign of Aśoka for them to lend support to the idea of a Brahmin reaction against Aśoka's religious policy. The oppressive conduct of imperial officials in the provinces of the empire and Aśoka's pacificism have been adduced as other causes for the decline and fall of the Mauryan empire. The casual references to wicked officials (*duṣṭa amātyas*) in the legends of the *Divyāvadāna* can give no secure foundation for postulating the general prevalence of oppression throughout the empire ; and there is nothing in the separate Kalinga edicts that goes to prove, as has been urged, that such oppression was a reality. Aśoka's pacificism, his abandonment of war as an instrument of policy, and his exhortation to his successors to follow him in this respect, had nothing doctrinaire about it, and was kept within limits by a wise awareness of the complexity of human situations and motives. There is no evidence that he diminished the strength of the army or weakened the defences of the empire.

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¹ Smith EHI (4) p. 204 and n. 2 *contra* H. C. Raychaudhuri, *Pol. His* 4. pp. 294 ff. where the arguments of Haraprasada Śāstri who first propounded this view are examined at length.

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Dynastic empires depend for their continued existence on the supply of able monarchs in the line ; Aśoka was great in every way ; he was not only the greatest of the Mauryas, but one of the few truly great rulers of the world. There was evidently none among his children equal to the task of maintaining the unity of the vast empire, and the division which, according to legend, threatened the empire even at the accession of Aśoka, actually overtook it after the close of his reign. But in India the rise and fall of empires, important though they are as landmarks, do not touch the cultural life of the nation as deeply as in other lands. Indian imperialism was never a fully centralised form of administration; without exception an Indian empire was more or less a loose confederation of nearly independent units, kingdoms, cities, tribes and so on, held together by loyalty to the person of the emperor when he had the strength to dominate them; but under the strongest emperor, the local rulers and institutions continued as before; and the disruption of an empire or its division did not raise those difficult problems of reorganisation which would have come up with the decadence of a more centralized system. In the day of its prosperity an empire did enhance the glory of the race and its achievements in the various spheres of national life did excel greatly those of the smaller kingdoms which usually filled the political map of the country; but the disappearance of an empire led by no means to a relapse into chaos or barbarism. India's ancient culture was the achievement of Indian society, not of the Indian state; an empire led to the efflorescence of that culture.

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Scions of the Mauryan family are heard of centuries after the fall of the Mauryan empire, and in remote parts of the country. In Magadha itself a certain Pūrṇavarman is mentioned by Hiuen Tsang as a descendant of Aśoka; and Śankara, the great philosopher of Advaita, might have had him in mind when he said: there have been no world emperors (sārvabhauma) after Pūrṇavarman! The Mauryas of Konkan had their capital at Puri, a flourishing amporium on the Elephanta island near Bombay, and they became subject to the Chālukyas of Bādāmi in the sixth century A. D. A certain Dhavala is heard of in the Kanaswa inscription (A. D. 738-9) in the Kotah state, Rajputana. And a Maurya chief Govindarāja is mentioned in an eleventh century inscription from Khandesh as a subordinate of the Yādava Seuṇachandra II¹. The memory of Mauryan rule persisted in Kuntala for a long time and it is alluded to in Kannada inscriptions of the eleventh century from Karṇāṭaka.

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¹ Watters II p. 115; Śankara B.S. II. 1. 18; BG. I ii pp. 282-4. For the location of Puri, Imp. Inserr. from the Baroda State by A. S. Gadre (1943) pp. 44-5.

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[Figure: THE EMPIRE OF ASOKA C. 274-236 B.C PILLAR EDICT...... ⊥ ROCK EDICT........ ▲ MINOR ROCK EDICT.. X SCALE OF MILES 100 0 100 300 500]

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[Figure: AFGHANISTAN KABUL PESHAWAR SHAHBĀZGARHĪ GANDHĀRA KASHMIR TAXILA MĀNSEHRĀ CEDED BY SELEUKOS NIKATOR YAVANAS R.Indus KALSI TOPRĀ ⊥ MIRATH ⊥ R.Jumna BAIRĀT X R.Ganges R.Narmada R.Tapti GIRNĀR SOPĀRA R.Godavari R.Mahanadi R.Krishna R.Kāveri NIGLIVA RUMMINDEI ⊥ RĀMPURWĀ ⊥ LAURIYĀ NANDANGARH ⊥ LAURIYĀ-ARARĀJ ⊥ PĀTALIPUTRA SĀRNĀTH KAUSĀMBI PRAYĀGA ⊥ RŪPNĀTH X SĀNCHI ⊥ JAU GADA ▲ DHAULI (TOSALI) KALINGA EARLY ĀNDHRAS YERRAGUDI X MASKI X SIDDAPURA ? SATVAPUTRA ? PĀRADAS CHOLA PANDYA KERALAPUTRA TĀMRAPARNI]

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CHAPTER VII

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SOUTH INDIA AND CEYLON

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The inscriptions of Aśoka at Brahmagiri and Siddhāpura in Mysore mark clearly the southern limit of the Mauryan empire which might have extended even a little further south to the latitude of the modern city of Madras. Kannaḍa inscriptions from Mysore and Bombay Karṇāṭak of the tenth and eleventh centuries A. D. preserve faint memories of the rule of Nandas in those parts, but there is little tangible confirmation of this tradition, unless it be that the punch-marked *purāṇa* coins found all over Deccan, South India and Ceylon are to be accepted as witnesses of ancient contacts between the North and South of which the details are now lost beyond recovery. Then there is the Jaina legend, late, multiform, and oft-discussed, of the migration of Chandragupta to Śravaṇa Belgola when Bhadrabāhu, the Jain patriarch, foretold a famine of twelve years' duration. Chandragupta is said to have lived several years as a Jain monk in Śravaṇa Belgola until his death by the rite of Sallekhana. The legend is improbable in itself and the identity of the Chandragupta it relates to is not above doubt. A late Pallava charter mentions an Aśōkavarmā among the earliest rulers of Kāñchī, and one may wonder if this is a reference to the Mauryan emperor.

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The most direct clues to the condition of South India and Ceylon in the Mauryan epoch are furnished by the references to the Southern kingdoms in Megasthenes, in the edicts of Aśoka, and in the short Brāhmī inscriptions in natural caverns with rock-cut beds scattered all over South India and found in somewhat larger numbers in the Madura and Tinnevelly districts, and much more on the island of Ceylon. The oldest strata of extant Tamil literature cannot lay claim to equal antiquity, but they contain references to Nandas and Mauryas, and it will be necessary to review them in their contexts, particularly because they have been made the basis of far-reaching theories regarding a Mauryan invasion of South India by some writers, while others have seen in them a reference to the Mauryas of Koṅkaṇ.

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Lastly, the *Mahāvaṃsa* has conserved the story of Ceylonese affairs in much detail, and as the chronicle is obviously worked up from more ancient records, and some of its details find confirmation in the rock-cut Brāhmī inscriptions above mentioned, we come to know a little more of Ceylon in this period than of the mainland of South India.

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The second and thirteenth Rock-Edicts of Aśoka mention the Southern kingdoms and Ceylon; the list in the second edict is fuller and comprises the names of Cōḍa, Pāṇḍya, Satiyaputa, Keralaputa and Tāmbapaṇṇi. All these lands lay outside the empire of Aśoka, but he was on such friendly terms with them that he could arrange for the medical treatment of men and animals in all these lands, and for the importation and planting of useful medicinal herbs and roots wherever they were needed; he also sent missionaries for the preaching of the Dhamma among the people of these countries—thus evincing his interest in the physical and mental well-being of his neighbouring states. Now the merest mention of such facts raises the presumption of a certain level of culture and progress in the arts of life. The Tamils and the Sinhalese had a settled polity and lived in well-ordered states, and some decades before the date of the Aśoka inscriptions, Megasthenes had heard somewhat of the trade of the Sinhalese and of the polity of the Pāṇḍyan kingdom¹. He knows that Ceylon is an island more productive than India of gold and large pearls; a good part of the island was forest inhabited by wild beasts, a large breed of elephants among them. His quaint account of the Pāṇḍyan kingdom seems to be an idealised mixture of fact and fable. He says that Heracles had a daughter Pandaea to whom he assigned the southernmost portion of India; the people in this country comprised 365 villages which brought by turns their tribute to the royal treasury every day of the year; what is called tribute here seems to have been the supply of the provisions needed for a day for the royal household; in the *Silappadikāram*, a work of six or seven centuries later than the time of Megasthenes, we hear of households of shepherds in the capital city of Madura supplying ghee by turns to the palace².

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¹ K. A. N. Sastri, *Foreign Notices*, p. 41.

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² xvii, l.7.

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Much discussion has taken place on the name Satiyaputa; it is now generally recognised that the ending -puta signifies membership of a tribe as demonstrated by Lüders. Satiya (which occurs as sātiya in Khālsi) must be sanskritized into satya-truth, though the formation satiya or sātiya must be held to be unusual. And the only tribe known to early Tamil literature, and answering to this description—‘members of the fraternity of truth’—are the Kōśar who were well known for their unswerving fidelity to the plighted word in assemblies and halls of justice, as well as for their heroism in war¹. The land of Koṅgu, modern Salem and Coimbatore districts roughly, is said to have been their home, and in the early centuries A. D. they seem to have overrun the Tuḷu country on the West coast. After the three well-known Tamil kingdoms, Pāṇḍya, Chōḷa and Chera (Kēraḷa), the tribe of the Kōśar may be said to occupy a considerable place in the literature of the Saṅgam period, and it seems highly probable that they should find a place in the earliest enumeration of the political divisions of the Tamil country. It has been suggested that Satyamangalam in the Coimbatore district, the home of a subdivision of the Bṛhat-caraṇa sect of the Brāhmaṇas of South India, has something to do with this name Satiyaputra²; there is little direct evidence in support of the view, and it is difficult to trace the antiquity of Satyamangalam or the sub-sect which bears its name to such remote times; but we know of several instances from the mediaeval period of Brahmin clans and groups distinguished for the very qualities of excellence in council-room and on the field of battle for which the Kōśar were celebrated, and there is no intrinsic improbability in the suggestion that Brahmins maintained this tradition continuously from the days of Bhīshma and Drōṇa of legendary fame. The Satputes among modern Marathas may have been emigrants to Mahārāṣṭra from the South³.

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¹ JRAS. 1923 pp. 609-13.

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² Smith: *Aśoka* p. 161.

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³ JRAS. 1919 p. 584 n. 1.

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The impression of a fairly developed cultural milieu in the Tamil land derived from the references in Megasthenes and the Aśoka inscriptions is confirmed by other lines of evidence.

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Kauṭilya notes that the Pāṇḍya-kavāṭa, a pearl fishery on the coast of the mainland on the gulf of Mannar, was noted for the quality of the pearls it exported, and that Madhurā, the capital of the Pāṇḍyas, lent its name to some of the finest cotton fabrics of all India¹. The Brāhmī inscriptions in rock caverns in hills have many features in common with the similar records of Ceylon, and these are among the earliest monuments of the Tamil country to which we may assign a date with some confidence. The script employed has much in common with the brief inscriptions from Bhaṭṭiprōlu, and may well be assigned to the third century B. C. Though these inscriptions have not yet been fully elucidated, enough is known to say that they are mostly either brief donative records or simply the names of monks who once occupied the beds or caverns. The close resemblance between these monuments and inscriptions and others of the same age in Ceylon and the name Kaḷugumalai, Tamil for Gṛdhrakūṭa, of one of the places where such inscribed caves are found, have been held to establish an exclusively Buddhist origin for these monuments ; it is, however, premature to formulate any views conclusively on such questions. New caverns and inscriptions are still discovered one by one—witness the inscribed natural cavern at Mālakonḍa in the Nellore district². And tradition is strong that Jainisme ame into South India about the same time as Buddhism if not earlier.

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¹ KA. II. 11.

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² ARE. 1937-8 II. 1

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While it is thus not possible to decide if these monuments are Jain or Buddhist or both in their origin, the study of the inscriptions made so far³ suggests that thought the script employed in them was Brāhmī of the southern variety, the language was Tamil still in its formative stages. The script was alphabetic, and already included signs for peculiarly Dravidian sounds like ṛ, ḷ, ḻ, and ṇ; other peculiarities are that vocalic consonants were represented by two symbols first the sign for the consonant and then the complete vowel signs—thus yu was written as y (a) u. These developments and other peculiarities, not detailed here, must have come as the result of a pretty long process of trial and error extending over several generations.

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³ Proc. Third Oriental Conference. pp. 275 ff.

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The exact contents of the inscriptions still remain obscure, but a few facts emerge from tentative studies of them. A husbandman (*kuṭumbika*) of Ceylon (*Ila*) figures as a donor; and a woman, members of the Karaṇi caste, and merchants (*vaṇikan*) figure in other inscriptions in a like capacity. These brief inscriptions are thus seen already to bear testimony to the support commanded from all classes of the laity by the ascetics who were engaged in the pursuit of the life divine in the solitudes of mountains and forests.

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We must now turn to a consideration of the references to the Nandas and Mauryas in early Tamil literature. They occur in five poems, three of which are by one writer, Māmūlanār whose statements are the clearest, and one each by two other poets. The relative chronology of the Śaṅgam poets is by no means settled, and the whole body of Śaṅgam literature can only be dated within broad limits in the first three centuries A. D. Thus the mention of Nandas and Mauryas in these poems is by no means a reference to contemporary facts, but to events preserved in the memory of people or in other ways of which we have no knowledge now. It may even be doubted if two poets whose references are not half as intelligible as those of Māmūlanār were really referring to the Mauryas of history or some aspects of an obscure mythology; that they both refer to the same fact or myt his clear beyond doubt; the expressions used are identical, though one, of them Kaḷḷil Āttiraiyanār¹, gives more details than the other—Paraṅgorranār². The fuller account refers to the Mōriyar, their victorious lance, their sky-scraping umbrella, and their chariots bearing banners; it then states that their strong bright-rayed wheel cut across a mountain at the end of the earth and rolled past it and past the broad disc of the sun fixed near the pass so made. The commentator ekes out the sense by some additions of his own; he says that the Mōriyar ruled the whole world, and that the mountain cut across by their discus was the silver-mountain which separated this earth from another world, and that the sun's disc was fixed near the pass by the gods. He also adds that the Mōriyar were the Chakravāla emperors or Vidyādharas and Nāgas, an interpretation which would suit the alternative reading ‘Ōriyar’ much better than the Mōriyar, the Mauryas of history. But stress need not be laid on the alternative reading, because, the cutting of the hill and the rolling of the wheel are features that, as we shall see, recur in the unmistakable references of Māmūlanār to the Mauryan emperors. It is clear at any rate, that if these two other poets were also thinking of the Mauryas, they had but vague notions about them and their achievements, and classed them with the superhuman beings whose deeds fill the annals of universal history for many aeons after the dawn of creation according to the Purāṇic lore of India.

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¹ Puram 175.

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² Aham 69.

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Māmūlanār had a better knowledge of the Nandas and the Mauryas, and his statements are much more precise and credible though he too retains the quasi-legendary feature which is all that the two other poets recorded about the Mauryas. He mentions the Nandas and the enormous treasure accumulated by them in a telling context. ‘What is it’, asks a love-lorn lady, ‘that has attracted my lover better than my charms?’ ; and among the alternatives postulated occurs this¹ : ‘Is it the treasure accumulated in the prosperous Pāṭaliputra and hidden in the waters of the Ganges by the Nandas of great renown, victorious in war?’ Here is much that we know of the Nandas from other sources, and one fact that is new—the manner in which they kept the treasure hidden under the waters of the Ganges, which reminds one of a similar practice attributed to the Mahārājas of Zabag by Arab travellers of the eighth century A. D. Māmūlanār’s mention of the Mauryas is accompanied by equally clear and precise indications of historical events. There are two passages for consideration, both from the Ahanāṉūṟu. One² starts by saying that the lover would not stay behind even if he got the wealth of the Nanda for doing so—a second reference to this topic by this poet ; it then proceeds to say that Kōśar of the victorious banner started operations against their foes and gained victories against several ; but as Mōhūr did not submit to them, the Mōriyas who had a large army led an expedition ; and it adds that the Mōriyar’s chariots rolled across a cutting made in the mountain for that purpose. Here is perhaps some fresh support for the identification proposed above of the Kōśar with the Satiyaputa ; but what is more important, the Mauryan imperial power was so friendly to the Kōśar as to be ready to go to their help in their wars against their enemies; this active intervention in the politics of the Tamil country brings to our view a phase of Mauryan imperialism that has so far escaped notice. The last reference in Māmūlanār¹ adds some more particulars; it says that when the Mōriyar turned to the south, the war-like Vaḍugar preceded them as their van, and the mountain which was cut to make a way for the chariots on this occasion is described as the large snow-mountain reaching up to the skies—obviously the Himālayas. This last detail betrays that Māmūlanār too is by no means free from the legendary notion about Mauryas that was the entire stock-in-trade of the two other poets; only he manages to convey to us some facts besides the legend. Vaḍugar is a rather vague term in Tamil literature ; it means literally northerners, and was generally applied to the Kannaḍa-Telugu peoples of Southern and Eastern Deccan together. These peoples were included in the Mauryan empire, and it is probable that in a move further south they were called upon to take the lead.

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¹ Aham 265.

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² Aham 251.

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¹ ib. 281.

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One last reference to the Nandas is simple and clear ; it occurs in Kuṟundogai² and refers to the abundance of gold in Pāṭaliputra besides mentioning elephants bathing in the Son river.

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² Poem no. 75.

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These Tamil texts, separated from the age of the Mauryas by about three to five centuries, thus indicate to us that the Tamil states were within the sphere of Mauryan influence, if we may use a convenient modern expression for the relation, and that at least on one occasion the Mauryas went to the assistance of the Kōśar to enable them to subdue the rebellious chieftain of Mōhūr ; the Vaḍugar took a hand in this expedition.

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And now one word on the legendary feature of the mountain being cut to make way for the wheel to roll across. This is obviously an echo of the mythology centring round the concept of the Chakravartin, the universal emperor, one of whose paraphernalia (*ratnas*) is the *chakra* (discus) ; this *chakra* leads the way in his *digvijaya* and has many mysterious properties, and Aśoka was counted as one of such emperors as the *Mahāvamsa* and other Buddhist books show. It is significant that in most of the references to the wheel cited above, it is not clear if the wheel of the war-chariots or the symbol of empire is meant, though once Māmūlanār definitely says it was the former. This feature in any event cannot be treated as history.

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Ceylon, like South India, steps into the light of history with its notice by Megasthenes and by the Aśoka inscriptions—both under the name Tāmbapaṇṇi which becomes Taprabane with the Greek writer. The opening chapters of the *Mahāvamsa* contain much edifying legend about the Buddha's visits to the island, the arrival of Vijaya, and his encounter with Kuvaṇṇā (Kuveṇi in other accounts), and his marriage with a princess from the Pāṇḍya country. Modern research has shown that the primitive population of the island were the Vaeddas, who were hunters living in forests and natural rock-dwellings ; the first immigrants into the island were probably people from the Malabar coasts who called themselves Nāgas and gave the name Nāgadvipa to the northern section of the island, the ancestors of the modern Nāyars of Malabar—Nāya being but the Prākṛit form of the word Nāga. The Vijaya legend, the Sinhalese language, and the Brāhmi script of the earliest inscriptions, are clear proofs of the advent of North Indian influences directly by sea, and the story of the marriage of Vijaya with a Pāṇḍyan princess represents perhaps the growth of contact between Ceylon and South India after they had both been Aryanized, each in its own way. Sinhalese memory goes back to a time prior to the advent of Vijaya when trading vessels coming in search of local products like ivory, wax, incense, pearls and gems, were sometimes wrecked on the shores of Ceylon. Much of this pre-history is necessarily speculative, and there can be no certainty about details. By the beginning of the Mauryan period in India, however, we may be certain that important settlements had been established in different parts of Ceylon and a fairly high degree of culture attained. The northern plain where was located Anurādhapura, the capital city, Rōhaṇa in the South-east, and Kalyāṇi in the South-west were perhaps the most notable divisions in this period, and they might have started as independent colonies established by separate groups of settlers from the different parts of the mainland, being the first fruits, as it were, of the overflow beyond the limits of India proper and across the sea of the great movement of Aryan expansion begun in Vedic times. Agriculture was practised and rice grown in considerable quantity to meet the necessities of a growing population; artificial irrigation by means of dams thrown across rivers and canals taking off from them had come into vogue; and the art of building with large-sized burnt bricks was known.

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According to the *Mahāvamsa*, the period covered by this volume comprised in the history of Ceylon the reigns of Paṇḍukābhaya (B.C. 377-307), Muṭasiva (307-247), Devānampiya Tissa (247-207) and Uttiya (207-197). The chronology of the first two reigns is suspect, as there is good reason to believe that their duration has been unduly lengthened in order to make Vijaya and the Buddha contemporaries¹. The account of Paṇḍukābhaya’s reign in the *Mahāvamsa*² is much of it palpable legend; but from it we may conclude generally that the king had to fight some of his collateral relations ruling in different parts of the island to impose his authority on those areas, that he made Anurādhapura the capital of the newly united kingdom, and that his reign witnessed decided advancement in the evolution of Sinhalese culture by the blending of the indigenous Vaeda (Yakkha) elements with the Indo-Aryan elements which had entered the island with Vijaya and his followers. The capital city was well laid out with tanks, parks, and separate quarters for the different elements in the population including yōnas, and among the recipients of the king’s benefactions were Nirgranthas, Ājīvakas and Brāhmaṇas, besides various other heretical sects. Of the reign of Muṭasiva the chronicle has nothing to say except that he laid out the beautiful garden called mahāmegha-vana and that he ruled the fair land of Laṅkā from the splendid city of Anurādhapura. He had ten sons ‘each thoughtful of the others’ welfare’

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¹ Geiger MV. (Tr.) p. xxi.

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² ib. ch. x.

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and two daughters. The second son Devānampiya Tissa was foremost among the brothers in virtue and intelligence, and succeeded his father. His friendly relations with the Mauryan emperor Aśoka, the exchanges of embassies and presents between them, the introduction of Buddhism into Ceylon by Mahinda and the fetching of a branch of the bōdhi-tree have been narrated in our account of Aśoka's reign. For the rest, there is good reason to believe that the development of culture by the reconciliation of the indigenous and exotic elements, by the growth of cities and the laying out of roads and extension of cultivation was going on apace. The Brāhmi inscriptions found by the score in practically all the caverns on every hill in the island and clearly belonging to the short period between the middle of the third century B. C. and the beginning of the first, attest the large numbers of Buddhist monks, votaries of the new sect introduced by Mahinda, and their peaceful occupation of these dwellings : but the primitive religious practices of the Vaeḍas seem to have been kept up side by side with other forms of worship. It is quite probable that some of the dagōbas and vihāras now in ruins, particularly those in Anurādhapura, may in their origin date back to the age of Tissa¹ and his successors, and that the style of these structures was borrowed from India along with Buddhism. The greeting of Mahinda by queen Anulā and five hundred (i.e. many) other women², and their subsequent ordination after the arrival of Saṅghamittā³, as also some references to women in the cave inscriptions show that women enjoyed a considerable amount of freedom and influence in this early Sinhalese society. The earliest coins of Ceylon were like those of India, purāṇas or śalākas, pieces of silver or copper of varying shapes, generally circular or oblong with a corner or corners chipped in some specimens and bearing punch marks on one side. Silver and copper are not products of Ceylon, and the metals, if not the coins themselves, must have been imported from India. A fragment of an admirably engraved thin cornelian showing the figure of a king sitting upon an ornamental chair ‘which can be no other than a royal throne’ was found in 1884 among the debris left round the Yaṭṭhāla dagoba at Tissa ; and this is considered by Parker a specimen of early North Indian work under strong Greek influence affording proof of the intercourse between Tissa and Aśoka recorded in the *Mahāvamsa*; he even suggests that the seated figure on the cornelian may be Aśoka himself¹.

Linked texts (19)

Kauṭilīya Arthaśāstra — Kauṭilya, Sanskrit
Brahmasūtra — Bādarāyaṇa, Sanskrit
Vāyupurāṇa — Vyāsa, Sanskrit
Divyāvadāna — Sanskrit
Cilappatikāram — Iḷaṅkō Aṭikaḷ, Tamil
Ἰνδική — Λούκιος Φλάουιος Ἀρριανός, Ancient Greek
Akanāṉūṟu — Uruttiracaṉmaṉ, Tamil
Puṟanāṉūṟu — Kapilar & Auvaiyār (Caṅkam), Tamil
Kuṟuntokai — Pūrikkō, Tamil
Harṣacarita — Bāṇabhaṭṭa, Sanskrit
Mahāvaṃsa — Pāli
Purāṇa — Sanskrit
Viṣṇupurāṇa — Vyāsa, Sanskrit
Pāṭaliputra
Bhattiprolu
Barâbar Hills
Mala Konda
Kalugumalai
Vṛddhagārgīyajyotiṣa — Garga, Sanskrit