History and Doctrines of the Ajivikas: A Vanished Indian Religion c25.s4.10

c25.s4.10

A further religious development, which affected the Ājīvikas, also shows a correspondence to contemporary political changes. While no monarch after Aśoka exerted so much power as he, the status of kingship rose from Mauryan times onwards. Aśoka, although "dear to the Gods", was a simple *rājā*. The Guptas, on the other hand, were emperors (*mahārājādhirāja*). In the succeeding epoch almost every independent king, however small his kingdom, adopted this or some such magniloquent title. The theory of the king’s divinity gained ground from Kushān times onwards. In the smaller kingdoms which succeeded the Mauryas, especially as the standards of bureaucratic administration declined, kings claimed a more exalted status and at the same time, owing to the smaller size of their kingdoms, their presence must have been felt more directly by their subjects. The impersonal principles of the heretical sects may have been appropriate to the less personal bureaucratic machine of the Mauryas, but they did not resemble the actual situation of later times, when power was usually vested in a single very exalted individual. Theism would be better suited to such a state of affairs, and theism did in fact begin to manifest itself as a significant element in the Indian religious situation at about the time of the break-up of the Maurya empire. Strengthened perhaps by survivals from popular chthonic cults, or even by ideas from the West, it developed throughout the Hindu period of India’s history, and, as we have seen, Ājīvikism itself was not unaffected by it.¹ Indian theism reached its final form when much of the land was in the control of alien monarchs, and when simple people must have been craving for the milder paternal despotism of such legendary rulers as Rāma and Vikramāditya. Thus the growth of devotional monotheism fits into the perspective of India’s political vicissitudes.