Hindu Polity: A Constitutional History of India in Hindu Times c43.52

c43.52

Lake. Opinion of Rudradāman's Ministers was against the king's proposal for repairing Sudarśana water-works. They refused to pay for the repairs and the king had to pay from his private purse.¹ Fortunately for Indian history the evidence of Rudradāman's inscription is as clear as any could be. It proves that the constitutional laws were not mere pious wishes, but they were as real as ordinary, municipal laws of the law-books. Thanks to the Buddhist works which have preserved the great constitutional datum on the reign of Aśoka in their pathetic lament that the Emperor of the whole of India was deprived of his sovereign authority by the ministers of state.² The *Gāthā*³ quoted by the Divyāvadāna is more ancient than the compilation of the Divyāvadāna, and the former could not have been composed many centuries after the event. The monks were to gain nothing by an invention of such a story which threw discredit on a great personage of their religious history. They would not have invented a story which would have been a bad precedent in case other monarchs wanting to imitate the munificence of the Maurya Emperor.