The Buddhist Welfare State of Ashoka

Abstract

Ashoka’s dynasty, the Mauryas, rose to power as a result of the collapse of the Persian Empire’s dominion in northwestern India after the invasion of Alexander the Great. Thus, Ashoka inherited the Mesopotamian imperial idea applied by the old Persian Achaemenid Dynasty under Cyrus and realized under Darius, who had united the “East” from the Indus River to the Libyan Desert. Like Darius, Ashoka proclaimed his deeds to Posterity in rock inscriptions. But whereas Darius’ famous rock inscription towers almost beyond the sight of the human eye in solitary heights, Ashoka’s inscriptions were set up at frequented thoroughfares and addressed not only Posterity but even more the people he ruled. Darius proudly enumerates the rebellions he crushed and the provinces he ruled; Ashoka mentions not so much that under him India was unified for the first time as that he desired to assist in the salvation of his subjects through the Moral Law (Dhamma): “To govern according to Dhamma, to administer according to Dhamma,.... to protect according to the Dhamma.”¹ The term Dhamma has been translated as what hats been made intelligible by Buddha to be the law of the world’s immanent order, uncreated but eternal. Dhamma thus means the universal causality of rational and at the same time moral norm.²