This is an excerpt from Nayanjot Lahiri’s book Searching For Ashoka: Questing for a Buddhist King from India to Thailand. Republished with permission from Permanent Black.
It takes a little over three hours to reach Bagan from Mandalay by an expressway that is featureless, as most such roads are. The dazzling destination, though, makes up for the journey. Bagan, I knew, has a couple of thousand monuments in an area a little over five thousand hectares, but I was still unprepared for a skyline filled with spires. It was just before sunset when we landed in the midst of its stupas and shrines and watched the atmosphere change from evening light to dense dusk. This skyline is best viewed from temples whose layered terraces reminded me of Borobudur in Indonesia. I don’t remember much about the temple to the middle terrace of which we climbed, except that the terrific strain was well worth the effort: the view, as the luminous orange orb sank slowly behind stupas and temples, their fringes enveloped by ground mist, was breathtaking.
Elements of the ancient and modern converge in amazing ways at Bagan. Ancient India can be spotted in the Mahabodhi Paya of the early-thirteenth century CE which is modelled after the temple bearing that name in Bihar – the one where Ashoka presented a throne (“vajrasana”) in remembrance of the Buddha’s enlightenment (Figs 6.2 and 6.3). A more contemporary and mundane connection was equally visible in wads of currency notes which had been “demonetised” by the Indian prime minister in November 2016, seriously inconveniencing virtually every Indian for no good reason and impoverishing many such as Bagan’s tourist guides who were in no position to use what they had earned in rupees. A happier connection here was the presence of India’s Archaeological Survey, which has helped in conservation work. At the Ananda temple – among the most important historic Buddhist temple complexes of the territory – Indian archaeologists had helped restore several parts of it. One of these restorers, Amalesh Roy, was steeped in Myanmar and its archaeology. A Bengali-speaking archaeologist who also spoke Burmese and wore a local lungi, he had recently retired from the Survey and, fortunately for us, was back in Bagan as a consultant. Our sense of the architectural landscape of Bagan, a boat ride on the Irrawaddy, and the views we had of Bagan’s shrines and museums all owe much to his sense of delight when sharing with us his deep knowledge of them.
Fig. 6.2: Mahabodhi temple in Bagan.
Fig. 6.3: View of the “shikhara” of Mahabodhi temple in Bagan.
In one of the temples on the edge of Bagan, in Mybinkaba, I ran unexpectedly into Ashoka. The twelfth-century Kubyauk-Gyi temple is, unlike the larger Buddhist pagodas and temples, a relatively small shrine to the south of the main archaeological complex in Bagan. Its small size does not prepare you for a magnificent interior. Stories featuring the Buddha and his life, his previous lives, kings, and more ordinary people are all told through wall paintings, with labels in the old Mon language which explain what is depicted. This language was used in epigraphs in south Myanmar and parts of central and northern Thailand. “Dhammasok” is how Ashoka is mentioned in the labels. I had only known the Myanmarese Ashoka from the epigraphs of Bagan-based kings; now he suddenly appeared more physically in several frescoes within the shrine.
The long history of contacts between South East Asia and South Asia antedates knowledge of Ashoka in the Irrawaddy basin: Buddhism is noted here in various Pali inscriptions from the fifth century CE onwards, the various formulae and verses in them most often given in their Theravadin recensions. Archaeology supports the existence of such contacts with other parts of Myanmar, as at the walled settlement of Beikthano where a Buddha image and a terracotta seal with the Brahmi script were found in contexts which go back to between the second and fourth centuries ce. Large bulbous stupas in Sri Ksetra in the south-central plains are made in a Sinhalese or Sri Lankan style. The Dipavamsa and Mahavamsa became major sources of artistic inspiration in twelfth-century Bagan, so that at the exquisite Kubyauk-Gyi temple Ashoka figures in various murals and their decorative textual glosses (Fig. 6.4). This temple’s interiors have more than five hundred murals and, when I first heard of Ashoka rendered within them, my immediate reaction was to think of them as Indian-inspired. I was mistaken: their source of inspiration is entirely the Sri Lankan chronicles. The Bagan–Sri Lanka relationship also included Anawrahta’s help in Vijayabahu’s resistance to the Cholas of South India, and in the monks sent from Bagan to Sri Lanka. Why the chronicles came to be so dramatically used at this particular temple, though, has to do more specifically with a Bagan prince, Rajakumar, who was the son of King Kyanzittha –to whose artistic activities we will soon turn.
Fig. 6.4: Kubyauk-Gyi temple.
The subjects depicted in the temple are Buddhist, ranging from the Jataka tales to scenes from the life of the Buddha and incidents relating to many historical kings; in these Ashoka figures rather prominently in his Buddhist avatar.
Nayanjot Lahiri
Searching for Ashoka – Questing for a Buddhist King from India to Thailand
Permanent Black (October 2022)
The northern wall of the entrance archway to the shrine contains four panels centring on incidents from his life, with the top tier on the northern wall showing a gloss: “This is king Kala, king of the Nagas. He creates a likeness of the Buddha and shows it to king Dhammasok (Asoka)”. The allusion is to a section in the Mahavamsa where Ashoka sends for the Naga king Mahakala, who has beheld four Buddhas and then created the “beauteous figure of the Buddha, endowed with the thirty-two great signs and brilliant with the eighty lesser signs.” Another epigraph says, “This is when king Dhammasok takes the relics”; a third speaks of a monastic dedication by the emperor: “This is when Dhammasok dedicates the monastery to . . .” – an allusion to the Mahavamsa’s description of Ashoka building the Ashokarama himself while exhorting all kings to build viharas. There are also label epigraphs on Ashoka’s engagement with the king of the “island of Singhal”. This reference is to the Sinhala monarch Devanampiya Tissa, described as a friend of the Indian ruler, who sent him the ornaments of sovereignty. Another panel concerns the time when Dhammasoka sent the relic of the tree with Theri Sanghamitta to the island of “Singhal”.
Ashoka’s engagement with the Samgha is captured in the representation of “Tisapagut” – a reference to Mogaliputta Tissa – and “King Dhammasok” discussing the broadening of their religion. The third Buddhist Council is mentioned in inscriptions, and Ashoka therefore inevitably figures in them. Mogaliputta Tissa performs miracles for Ashoka in one, and in another Ashoka gets his ministers to tell the monks to hold the Uposatha festival (Figs 6.5 and 6.6.).
In the painting where Mogaliputta Tissa figures, he is dominant while Ashoka seems to be there by the way, alongside a whole lot of others. These paintings are part of a small set on the Buddhist Councils. In one of them we see King Ajatshatru who called the first Council, and in another King Kalasoka in whose time the Second Council was supposed to have been held. All three Councils are recorded in the Pali chronicles of Sri Lanka.
Fig. 6.5: Mogaliputta Tissa performing miracles for Ashoka, shown with a crown to his right.
Fig. 6.6: Ashoka requesting monks to hold the Uposatha festival, Mogaliputta at the centre.
These frescoes featuring Ashoka are unlike anything that I had seen in South Asia. Why had the Bagan rulers chosen to represent him and South Asian Buddhism? Understanding this requires a short historical excursion. Bagan had become the region’s political capital in the middle of the eleventh century with King Anawrahta. Some decades later, after the rule of Anawrahta’s son Man Lulan, there came the third ruler in this line, Kyanzittha. To accede, Kyanzittha needed the support of the Mons and forged a union with them by marrying his daughter to a Mon prince and promising that his own heir would be none other than their offspring. This deprived Rajakumar, Kyanzittha’s own son, of his inheritance – along the general lines of Bhishma when he is ruled out as a future king in the Mahabarata. Rajakumar, being artistically inclined and in need of something to do now that he was never going to be ruling the kingdom, busied himself with temple murals, the result being the temple masterpieces commemorating Ashoka and Buddhism.
Rajakumar in fact mastered the full range of Theravada literature, cosmology, and history, and put his knowledge spectacularly on display in his temple. His intent, as far as I could tell, was to use paint and accompanying explanatory gloss to provide the worldview of the textual tradition to Buddhists of his time. Rajakumar also does what many scholars do: he engages with the text, dropping the bits that do not interest him and adding others that make the story more personal. He brings the story of Buddhism’s spread up to the time of the Anawrahta, whom his father had served as a general. The Sinhalese king –Vijayabahu, who died around time this temple was being built, is imaged here as well.
Rajakumar’s art patronage immortalises him far more comprehensively than the ordinary wielding of power would have done had he become king. I could not help wondering how his narration of the Buddhist past might have differed had he not relied on the Sri Lankan chronicles. Thoughts of this kind crossed my mind because, searching for the historically authenticated Ashoka, I was instead constantly confronted with a Buddhist avatar – and this meant yet another localised transformation of Ashoka into a figure that did not match the monarch in his own Indian records.
