Aspects of Mahayana Buddhism and its Relation to Hinayana c5.s2.t6.1

c5.s2.t6.1

We are yet in the dark about the part played by Asoka in the propagation of Buddhism. If he helped in the propagation of Buddhism at all, we are not aware whether he supported any particular school of Buddhism, or Buddhism in general. Throughout his exhortations, so far as they have been found in the Edicts, there is not the slightest hint of his actively helping the propagation of Buddhism. His edicts refer to the *dhammavijaya* as opposed to conquest by arms, but by *dhamma* he does not mean Buddhism. His *dhamma* consisted of maxims for leading an ideal life and performing meritorious acts which make a person happy in this world as well as the next. The edicts do not contain a single reference to Nirvāṇa or Śūnyatā, Anātma or Duḥkha, while on the other hand, they speak of heaven, and happiness in a heavenly life,² which was never an ideal of early Buddhism, for it considered existence in any one of the three dhātus, Kāma, Rūpa and Arūpa to be misery (*duḥkha*). But it must be admitted that when an emperor like Asoka shows a bias for a particular religion and even proclaims himself to be a Buddhist upāsaka and pays visits to the monasteries or sacred places of the Buddhists, the religion automatically receives an impulse, and its propagation by the Buddhist monks then becomes easy. So we may regard Asoka as a passive propagator of Buddhism, and, during his rule, the religion probably made its way throughout his kingdom, also reaching places beyond his dominion, viz., the kingdoms of the Yavanas, Kambojas, Gāndhāras, Pitinikas on the west, and Codas, Pāṇḍyas as far as the Tāmraparṇi on the south.¹ As Asoka was an adherent of Buddhism only as a supporter, or as an upāsaka,² we cannot expect him to be interfering in the sectarial disputes that were going on in his time. Hence it is difficult to attach importance to the tradition of the Mahāvaṃsa that he supported the Vibhajjavādins (=Theravādins),³ or to that of the Avadānas that he was an ardent devotee of Upagupta. It is also remarkable that he does not refer to the Bodhisattva conception, nor to the pāramitās, which could suitably have been incorporated into his code of moral maxims. His admonition to his subjects to choose the middle path, avoiding the two extremes, viz., of retirement from the world on the one hand and of indulgence in envy, anger, laziness and so forth on the other,⁴ shows that he was not so much in favour of retirement from household life, upon which the early Hīnayāna Buddhists always laid emphasis. Asoka's preference for the life of an ideal upāsaka as against that of a monk may have stimulated the Buddhist monks to devise ways and means to popularise their religion, and as the result of the efforts of the monks in this direction, we have the large number of the Jātakas and Avadānas.