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Updated: June 14, 2025
There is no doubt of the connection between Kashmir and the Sarvâstivâdins nor anything improbable in the supposition that the first missionary activity was in the direction of Muttra and Kashmir. But the great landmark in the earlier history of Buddhism is the reign of Asoka. He came to the throne about 270 B.C. and inherited the vast dominions of his father and grandfather.
Two great Indian empires there certainly were in the third century B.C. and the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., and the paternal benevolence of Asoka, the great Buddhist emperor of the third century B.C., deserves record and all honour.
O beauteous Asoka, do thou speedily free me from grief. Hast thou seen king Nala, the slayer of foes and the beloved husband of Damayanti, freed from fear and grief and obstacles? Hast thou seen my beloved husband, the ruler of the Nishadhas, clad in half a piece of cloth, with delicate skin, that hero afflicted with woe and who hath come into this wilderness?
It is generally agreed that the eighteen schools were in existence during or shortly before the reign of Asoka, and that six others arose about the same period, but subsequently to them.
The nature and value of the Pali Canon form the subject of the fifth chapter and the sixth is occupied with the great Emperor Asoka whose name is the clearest landmark in the early history of Buddhism, and indeed of India. The seventh and eighth chapters discuss topics which belong to Hinduism as well as to Buddhism, namely, meditation and mythology.
A grand monastery was subsequently built at it, famous by the residence for five years of Hsuan-chwang. See chap. xvi, note 11. There is some doubt as to the statement that Nala was his birthplace. The city of "Royal Palaces;" "the residence of the Magadha kings from Bimbisara to Asoka, the first metropolis of Buddhism, at the foot of the Gridhrakuta mountains.
O beauteous Asoka, do thou speedily free me from grief. Hast thou seen king Nala, the slayer of foes and the beloved husband of Damayanti, freed from fear and grief and obstacles? Hast thou seen my beloved husband, the ruler of the Nishadhas, clad in half a piece of cloth, with delicate skin, that hero afflicted with woe and who hath come into this wilderness?
But these facts do not prove that Sanskrit was not the language of the canon at an earlier date and it is not safe to conclude that because Asoka did not employ it for writing edicts it was not the sacred language of any section of Indian Buddhists.
That there is a bridge connecting the past glory of Hellas and Rome with the prouder fabric of modern history; that Western Europe is Romanic, and Germanic Europe classic; that the names of Themistocles and Scipio have to us a very different sound from those of Asoka and Salmanassar; that Homer and Sophocles are not merely like the Vedas and Kalidasa attractive to the literary botanist, but bloom for us in our own garden all this is the work of Caesar; and, while the creation of his great predecessor in the east has been almost wholly reduced to ruin by the tempests of the Middle Ages, the structure of Caesar has outlasted those thousands of years which have changed religion and polity for the human race and even shifted for it the centre of civilization itself, and it stands erect for what we may designate as eternity.
King Asoka, for instance, the Buddhist sovereign of India, 250 years before Jesus, in one of his edicts chiseled on the rocks of India, declared against human slavery and offered the sweet gift of liberty to all in captivity. There was slavery of the worst kind in the world of Jesus, and yet he never opened his mouth to denounce the awful curse.
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