Cape Comorin Volume II Issue II July 2020

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ISSN: 2582-1962 Cape Comorin Volume II Issue II July 2020

An International Multidisciplinary Double-Blind Peer-reviewed Research Journal

Maurya Dynasty. Myth, Legend or History

Daya Dissanayake, Novelist, Poet and Blogger, Udumulla Road, Battaramulla, Sri Lanka

Abstract: Over the past two centuries we have created a Maurya dynasty, or which should have been called a Chandragupta dynasty. Though Rama was deified, and the deification extended to Hanuman and Valmiki as we find at Ram Tirth in Amritsar, even Asoka Maurya has not been deified yet, leaving us the freedom to discuss the historicity of the Mauryas. In India Buddha and Mahavira have become founders of two great religious traditions. They are accepted as historical characters, and their biographies cannot be questioned, because it would amount to questioning the faith of people. About other people we come across in the long history of India, specially those who are believed to have lived Before the Common Era, we do not have any solid evidence of writing or archaeological remains to determine their historicity, chronology or about their lives. Their biographies are accepted by many as history, by a few as legends, and could even be considered myths only. We call him Chandragupta assuming he is the same Sandracottus of the Greeks. Bindusara is claimed to be his son, identified as Amitrocades. Aśoka/Devanampiya/Piyadassi is accepted as his grandson, but never mentioned by the Greeks, by any name, Greek or Indian. Chandragupta‟s biography was created by the British, selectively picking from secondary and tertiary Greek sources, and from a drama produced about eight centuries after Chandragupta. Alexander was a hero, a great warrior, while Chandragupta was „an oriental despot‟, who was greatly influenced by Alexander. Thus they accepted that Chandragupta was Sandrocottus, and the connection with Alexander. All we know about Alexander is from what was recorded by his own people, who would have tried to create a great war hero. Other than his courage, cunning and fighting skills, there is no evidence that Alexander was able to hold and rule the land he had captured. It is time to attempt the search of a historical Maurya dynasty. Keywords: Chandragupta, Bindusara, Aśoka, Maurya, Alexander

“Myth is history for those who believe in its empirical reality”, Prof. Gananath Obeysekara begins his book, „Stories and Histories‟ (2019). Separating myth from legend and history is a near impossible task, when written material cannot be authenticated, or understood in their original context, and when there is hardly any archaeological evidence.

“Nothing is more injurious than the habit of putting inferences, however satisfactory, on a level with primary historical facts to which they attach themselves.” (Latham R. G)

“So far as annals, king lists, chronicles, dates of important battles, biographies of rulers and cultural figures go, there is no Indian history worth reading. Any work where the casual reader may find such detailed personal or episodic history for ancient India should be enjoyed as romantic fiction (like some Indian railway time-tables!), but not believed.” (Kosambi. 1965. P 22).

"Most things do not happen as they should, and some things do not happen at all: it is the business of the conscientious historian to correct these defects". This quote is attributed to Mark Twain.

In India Buddha and Mahavira have become founders of two great religious traditions. They are accepted as historical characters, and their biographies cannot be questioned, because it would amount to questioning the faith of people. About other people we come across in the long history of India, specially those who are believed to have lived Before the Common Era, we do not have any solid evidence of writing or archaeological remains to determine their historicity, chronology or about their lives. Their biographies are accepted by many as history, by a few as legends and could even be considered myths only. Over the past two centuries we have created a Maurya dynasty, or which should have been called a Chandragupta dynasty. Though Rama was deified, and the deification extended to Hanuman and Valmiki as we find at Ram Tirth in Amritsar, even Asoka Maurya has not been deified yet, leaving us the freedom to discuss the historicity of the Mauryas. I have not come across the term „Chandragupta Dynasty‟ with reference to the three rajas, Chandragupta, Bindusara and Aśoka. If they had really been historical characters, we should have identified them as the Chandragupta dynasty, because the term Maurya was never mentioned in the earliest written records.

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ISSN: 2582-1962 Cape Comorin Volume II Issue II July 2020

An International Multidisciplinary Double-Blind Peer-reviewed Research Journal

We have built a huge mountain over a pebble, and today we are unable to find this pebble anymore. It could be more than just a pebble, it could be an invaluable gem, and that is why it is important to search for it, however difficult it would be. Ananda Guruge used the term “faith-inspired accretion" (Guruge 1993 p. 43), for this mountain. We call him Chandragupta assuming he is the same Sandracottus of the Greeks. Bindusara is claimed to be his son, identified as Amitrocades. Aśoka/Devanampiya/Piyadassi is accepted as his grandson, but never mentioned by the Greeks, by any name Greek or Indian.

Chandagupta

Chandragupta, as we know him today, is as much a creation of British and Indian politicians and historians, in the same way as they did with Aśoka. Churchill denied the existence of a country called India before the British arrived, and claimed that “India had no more a political personality than Europe. India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the equator” . The Indian freedom fighters had to create their own history, and among the historical characters they had to build up were Chandragupta and Aśoka. To create their chronology they had to hang it on the chronology of the Greeks, specially Alexander. William Jones provided them a hook to hang it, by claiming that Sandrocottus and Chandragupta was one and the same. “...the contemporary of Alexander was not Chandragupta Maurya, but Chandragupta I of the Gupta dynasty”. (D. R. Mankad, Puranic Chronology. 1951. Preface.) Mankad explains his comment in greater detail in his Introduction. But Arrian mentions Sandracottus, and not Chandragupta, and Mankad contradicts himself by identifying Aśoka‟s grandfather as Chandragupta Maurya, when the Puranas mention the Maurya dynasty coming after the Nandas. Even if we accept Sandrocottus was Chandragupta, the western sources do not mention anything about his origins. “The Puranas were more concerned with the origin of the Nanda kings than that of Chandragupta.” (Mookerji. 1960 p. 9). There is a Xandrames mentioned but not identified, as the father of Sandracottus. There is no other record of the names of his parents. Arun Kumar Goswamy claims that “Chandragupta Maurya succeeded in bringing together most of the Indian subcontinent. As a result, Chandragupta is considered the first unifier of India and the first genuine emperor of India. His achievements, which ranged from defeating Alexander‟s Macedonian satrapies and conquering the Nanda Empire by the time he was only about 20 years old, to defeating Seleucus Nicator and establishing centralized rule throughout Southern Asia, remain some of the most celebrated unconfirmed events in Indian history.” Ever since William Jones, a Judicial Officer, announced on February 28, 1793 that Sandrocottus was Chandragupta, almost all historians, western and eastern, tried to find evidence to prove this idea. They identified names, places, incidents and records, interpreting everything to comply with this created history. William Jones identifies the king Sandrocottus as Chandragupta from a Sanskrit drama Rudra-Rakshasa by Visakhadatta written during the Gupta dynasty in the 4th or 5th century or later. The play also refers to a Brahmin statesman Chanakya, also called Kautilya or Vishnugupta. McCrindle's description of India and Chandragupta, based on Megasthenes and Arrian, could not be accepted as there is no other evidence to conform the association of Chandragupta and Alexander. Even when McCrindle works out Chandragupta‟s year of birth at or around 343 BCE, it is accepting that Chandragupta was thirteen years younger than Alexander. McCrindle (1877, p. 20) quotes Strabo, “Generally speaking, the men who have hitherto written on the affairs of India, were a set of liars, - Deimachos holds the first place in the list, Megasthenes comes next:..”. Yet McCrindle depends on the yarns by Megasthenes to write the history of India. Even if we accept there was a historical character as Megasthenes, that he visited Pataliputra, that he wrote about what he saw and observed, it is claimed that only a few fragments remained of such writings on which later historians based their records. We do not know if Megasthenes had learned Magadhan language or someone translated for him, that he has only second hand information. We do not know if he had travelled around Jambudvipa or just recorded what he heard from people in the city. “It is reasonable to presume that Megasthenes could not have had a first-hand knowledge of things excepting the administration of the Capital city...The major portions of the Indica must have been drawn from mere hearsay and reports. Even here he was confronted by a serious handicap which was his ignorance of the language or languages of India.” (Dikshitar 1953 p. 33) We can trace what Megasthenes may have written, only through the writings of later writers who 'quote' him, Strabo c. 64 B.C., Diodorus - 36 B.C., Pliny the Elder, 75 A. D., Arrian c. 130 A. D. an Justin 2nd cent. A. D. When we have to depend on fragments of a document, it would mean that we interpret the fragments as we understand them, or as we want to interpret them for others. We have the opportunity to decide what is important, what is genuine, what could be ignored and discarded. The less we know about a famous person, the

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An International Multidisciplinary Double-Blind Peer-reviewed Research Journal more romantic becomes his life story, specially early life, and probably that is what happened to Chandragupta, and later to Aśoka. Legends grow and continue to grow, long after a person is dead and gone. If the person is suspected to be of a lower social status the more romantic the story becomes. The details of Chandragupta's early life we owe mostly to Buddhist legends, both Theravada and Mahayana. We have only the Greek sources regarding the association of Chandragupta with Seleucus Nicator, how Chandragupta acquired Gandhara, south of the Hindukush mountain range, including what is now modern Kabul, Ghazni, Kandahar, Herat and Baluchistan, or why he gifted 500 old war elephants and their drivers to Seleucus, or if Chandragupta got Seleucus' daughter in marriage. Chandragupta is accepted as the founder of the „Maurya Dynasty‟. If we are to believe all the legends, Chandragupta should have been accepted as the first Indian ruler to have built such a vast empire and as 'Chandragupta the Great', and we should have named his successors as the Chandragupta Dynasty, instead of Maurya Dynasty. His achievements were ignored by all writers, probably because he had made the wrong choices, or because there was no such king. He did not support Brahmins or give them the respect they expected. Had H. G. Wells known about Chandragupta, if he wanted to, he would have described Chandragupta the way he described Aśoka. There is no way to confirm if Chandragupta first liberated the land under the Greeks and then went on to conquer the Magadha kingdom, or liberated the country from the tyrannical rule of the Nandas first. That is, unless we accept the story about Chandragupta and Chanakya learning to capture Magadha, from a woman showing a child how to eat a very hot roti starting from the periphery, instead of from the centre, which would be the hottest. However if Chanakya did not know how to eat a hot roti, we need to consider if he had the brains to guide Chandragupta. There is always some such incident in the early life of many well known people. There are also no records of the real extent of Chandragupta's kingdom, or its boundaries. We also do not know how the boundaries had been defined, and if there were identifiable markings unless where the boundaries had been identified as a river, mountain or other geographical mark. There may not have been any border security as we know it today, and people would have been free to cross the borders. Any inspection or control may have been only at major roadways or ports. Mookerji records that Chandragupta's empire included the land of the five rivers up to the Indus and Seleucus ceded Arachosia (Kandahar) and Paropaisadae (Kabul) together with a portion of Aris (Herat) and Gerosia (Baluchistan) (Mookerji 1960 p. 36), and that is why it was possible for his grandson Aśoka to declare in RE II and III, that the Syrian emperor Antiochus (Amtiyako yona-rajo) was his immediate neighbour (anta or pratyanta king). Appian suggests a marriage alliance with Seleucus becoming father-in-law or son-in-law of Chandragupta. (Mookerji 1960 p 37) “The connection between Chandragupta and Alexander stems only from two sources: Plutarch and Justin. Especially Plutarch's alleged meeting between the two fired the imagination of many. I therefore fully agree with Schwarz that the connection between Alexander and Chandragupta should not be taken at face value but rather seen as a literary trope..”(Fouconnier p 159) Schwarz argued that the true goal of Chandragupta's endeavours was the throne of Magadha in the Ganges plains, not the liberation of the north-west during the invasion of Alexander.” (Schwarz 276-77) To sum up the legends of Chandragupta, as believed by many, he came of the Kshatriya clan of the Moriyas, who were kinsmen of the Sakyas. When his father died in a conflict, mother had escaped to Pataliputra. The child born to her was handed over to her brother for safety who kept him in a cow pen, grew up as a cowherd. Chanakya, who was planning revenge on the Nandas saw the boy playing king with other boys, recognized the potential in Chandragupta, purchased him from his uncle for 1000 karshapanas, and took him to Taxila for his education. We do not have any information about Chandragupta's birth. Romila Thapar considers him to be a Vaisya. His mother could also have been a Sudra woman and a courtesan of the Nanda king. It is the Mahavamsa which claims he was born of a family of Kshatriya called Moriyas. This is said to be supported by the reference to a Kshatriya clan named Moriyas. But it was in the best interest of the Lankan chroniclers to claim Kshatriya descent so the Lankan kings too find a link to them and even to the Buddha. If the stories about Chandragupta were true, he should have been revered as a real hero by the twentieth century fighters for independence, as he would have been the first to have regained the land conquered by an invading force. As Mookerji said, Chandragupta “was first to dispose of what may be called the tall poppies of Greek India, its provincial governors who were all Alexander‟s generals.” The death of Alexander meant the death of Greek rule in India. (Mookerji. 1960 p 32). Dhanananda himself had been called 'ekrat', a single king, with the land under ekachchatra, one umbrella. Saravana Belgola where Chandragupta died, is also an unknown place, if we accept that Bhadrabahu, led migration of Jains to the South, because of severe famine in Bihar, if Chandragupta was a great hero would he have abandoned his people, including his own family to abdicate his throne and follow the Jains? There is a

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An International Multidisciplinary Double-Blind Peer-reviewed Research Journal possibility that he was overthrown by Bindusara, if we go by the way history has repeated itself all over the world. Patricide, fratricide, mariticide and genocide has been the practice most often.

Bindusara

Bindusara is a strange name for a king, not found elsewhere in the entire history of India. If it was just a nickname, based on the legend of how he got spots all over his skin, then there should have been a name given to him at birth or at his coronation. Perhaps he was the only king in India without a given name. Amitrocades was identified with an Amitragaha, but such a character is not known among the Indian sources. Though we do not try to explain the name Chandragupta, we try to explain Amitragaha, as „Slayer of enemies‟, probably because it is a name unheard of in India. We may never know if Chandragupta abdicated, when and why, and also what role Chanakya had played in the abdication or installation of Bindusara as king, if Bindusara was the eldest son, and heir apparent, or if there had been a struggle for the throne. We do not know if Bindusara was the son of Chandragupta. We do not know if Bindusara took over the throne and threw Chandragupta out in his old age, thus forcing the old king to become a mendicant as far away from Magadha, as he could go. After he began to follow Mahavira and Jain Dhamma, perhaps Chandragupta felt remorse about all the killing he had done in his greed for power and that may have been his reason for abdication. The conquest of the South could not have been the work of Aśoka. Nor was it that of his father Bindusara, even if he was Amitraghata (slayer of enemies)? Taranatha mentions that Chanakya accomplished destruction of the nobles and kings of sixteen towns and made Bindusara as one of his great lords. If Chanakya had found Chandragupta as a child, Chanakya would have been a very old man by the time Chandragupta had died and Bindusara became king. Whether he could guide Bindusara to wage war and acquire more territory is questionable. We have even less information about Bindusara, than we have of his father or his son. We do not know if he had seriously tried to maintain the vast empire left to him, and if he had tried to expand it further. Even if we do not accept the third-hand report several centuries later by Athenaeus that Bindusara requested Antiochus to send him, “sweet wine, dried figs and a sophist”, Bindusara would have been too preoccupied in the harem, procreating around 200 children. If we believe the Pali chronicles that he had 101 sons, he would have produced about an equal number of daughters. We do not have much information on Pataliputra, or if it was Palibothra of the Greeks. We try to imagine what Pataliputra would have been like, based on what Megasthenes is said to have written. Mehasthenes who talked about gold digging ants……… When he says that Pataliputra was 9 miles (14.4 km) long and 1.5 miles wide (2.4 km) even if we accept that, we also accept that 570 towers and 64 gates. But so far we have discovered only the 80 stone pillars of a building in what was then Pataliputra. Perhaps Bindusara is just convenient nonentity created to fill the time gap between Chandragupta and Aśoka

Aśoka

If there was no historical Bindusara, then we cannot link Chandragupta to Aśoka , and thus no dynasty, Maurya or Chandragupta. Yet we have heard and read or watched about Aśoka ever since we were children. So many books, research papers and biographies, novels and films have been published about Aśoka. Yet the Greeks had never heard of an Aśoka, or had not found him important enough to be mentioned. There is no historical evidence of a person called Aśoka today, a name he had himself only used a very few times. Perhaps he never liked this name. If we could identify the „real‟ Aśoka, it would, in turn, help us to identify Chandragupta and Bindusara if they had been historical characters. Aśoka, if he was real, probably was in the right place at the right time, to have been called by H. G. Wells as “one of the greatest monarchs the world has ever seen.... the name of Aśoka shines, and shines almost alone, a star. From the Volga to Japan, his name is still honoured. China, Tibet, and even India, though it has left his doctrine, preserve the tradition of his greatness.” Perhaps H. G. Wells did more damage to the historical Aśoka, than any historical person from the Aśokan era to this date, by making such a statement, without knowing much about Aśoka and based on secondary or tertiary sources and his vivid imagination. When Aśoka wrote about Dhammavijaya in the Thirteenth Rock Edict, it was translated by Hultzsch (p.48) as „conquest by morality‟. However there is no record of any land or a people he had really conquered by his Dhamma, unless we consider Lanka, about which Aśoka is silent. Lanka, even if it had been under the powers of Aśoka, he had not conquered it, but the country had been handed over to him by Tissa, when he usurped the throne, seeking the protection of a big brother.

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To consider that Aśoka was responsible for the spread of Buddha Dhamma around the world, or made it a world religion, or that he was converted to Buddhism or was a Buddhist, is a fallacy based on the Pali chronicles once again. What has become a world religion is not Buddha Dhamma, and what is known as Buddhism around the world is not one religion, but many heterodox religions (to borrow Max Weber‟s term), or many 'Buddhisms', which had evolved from or degenerated into, from the new schools of thought 'pasamda', which developed in India before the Common Era. The credit for the propagation of these „Buddhisms‟ should go to the merchants and the monks who traveled with them all over the world. One very good example is Tapassu and Bhalluka, as followers of Buddha, who are known from Gandhara, Sri Lanka, and in eastern regions all the way to China. Aśoka could also have been a victim of politico-religious manipulations. He could have been manipulated by his ministers and the Saṁgha. He continued to be manipulated by the Brahmans, Buddhists, the Pali chroniclers in Lanka, and then in recent times by the British, and by Gandhi, Nehru and the Congress, and by the late president Premadasa of Sri Lanka. “The Buddhist appropriated Aśoka for their own use.” (Norman, 1997 p.127). The major appropriation would have been done by the Lankan king, Tissa (307 – 267 BCE), or the Pali chroniclers who „created‟ the Sri Lanka‟s past. We could also say that Aśoka appropriated Buddha and then Aśoka himself was appropriated by the Buddhists, and then by Nehru and the Indian government. Aśoka and his 'dynasty' was also appropriated by Vishakadatta in the Sanskrit drama Mudra-Rakshasa written during the Gupta dynasty 4th or 5th century or later. Today he is appropriated by the film and television industry, purely for commercial gain. Had Aśoka inscribed his edicts in a script other than Brahmi, or the script he used had continued after him, it would have been really interesting to speculate how the inscriptions could have affected Indian polity, and also how the later literature on Aśoka could have developed. Aśoka is believed to have led two lives, as Chandaśoka and Dharmaśoka. Three versions of Aśoka‟s violence as a Chandaśoka is found in the legends. First when he murdered 99 brothers to usurp the throne. (Mahavamsa). Murder of hundreds of people in Kalinga. (his own inscription Major Rock Edict XIII), third the Murder of the Nigrantha ( Aśokavadana). Or was he an Ahimsavadi, a follower of Mahavira or Buddha throughout his life as a Dharmaśoka only?

Maurya

Another discrepancy we come across in Aśokan inscriptions is his comment about killing and eating peacocks in the palace, which would have been the practice from the time of his grandfather, unless it was an ancient tribal custom to consume the flesh of their totem animal. “Only two peacocks and one deer were killed in Asoka‟s kitchen” as admitted by him in his Major Rock Edict I. “It is impossible to derive by any grammar Maurya as a direct formation from Mura. The derivative from Mura is Maureya. The term Maurya can be derived only from the masculine Mura which is mentioned as the name of a gotra in a Ganapatha to Panini's Sutra (IV 1, 151). It is strange that the derivation of the term has not been traced by this track.” (Mookerji. 1960 p 10) All the literary evidence about 'Maurya' is from much later times. Even the evidence from monuments and Aśokan sculptures are still conjecture, just because the peacock is found on the Aśokan pillar at Nandangarh and the stupa at Sanchi, it is difficult to accept that Aśoka meant them to be their clan symbol, because he had other animals like the cow and the lion and the horse sculpted on his pillars. There is also a possibility that Chandragupta came to be identified later as a Maurya to distinguish him from Chandra Gupta I and II of the 4th century CE. The advocates of a Maurya dynasty have not been able to find a Greek mention of the name or anything similar to it. If Sandrocottus was not Chandragupta, then we do not have a chronology for the Maurya dynasty. Then even if the figure „256‟ means years from birth or death of the Buddha, we do not have any idea of the year. We also do not have any explanation of why Aśoka decided to count the years from the parinirvana of the Buddha. Chanakya is another mystery even though all the Indian records agree that Chanakya secured the removal of the last of the Nanda line and replaced him with Chandragupta. If Chanakya was a Brahmin, it could be that he was a creation by later Brahmin scribes to establish their superior intelligence, capability and vision. Then to add to his stature, they would also have linked his name with Kautilya and the Arthasastra, at a much later date. An individual cannot rank as a historical person unless his life and work are placed in time, and we do not have any precise data to fix the dates for Chandragupta, Aśoka or even Buddha. Without any confirmation of the time, it is not easy to determine the historicity of any individual or family. Ashoka never mentions his father or mother in any of his inscriptions, and there are no other written records or archaeological evidence. Without any information of his parents we have no way to identify his grandparents.

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Even many who read the inscriptions were misled by the early translators or refused to consider any other possible meanings of the words and phrases of some of the inscriptions. Norman had this to say. “Modern writers‟ claims about Aśoka which are not supported by his own words because they have either read only the Buddhist sources or been misled by other modern writers.” (Norman 1997. p. 127) The past has always been used, reused, and abused, over the ages, for various reasons. In India Aśokan past came into greater prominence after a long gap of over two millennia, and that could be why his symbols were used in the newly emerging Indian state, and why Aśoka has become one of the most studied historical characters in the world, after the religious leaders. But he still remains a mystery. H. G. Wells‟ statement was accepted all over the world as "gospel truth", even among the Buddhists, many historians in India and other South Asian countries. Any adverse comments or disagreements were considered sacrilege, heresy, and in India, as traitorous. This situation has not changed even after nearly two and a half millennia. When we ask ourselves what has Aśoka achieved to be so considered, it depends on what we mean by 'greatness' or 'hero'. A question for which we may never be able to find answers is, how popular was Aśoka among his people, his officials and even his family. We have only what he himself says in his inscriptions, and what others have said about him, many centuries later. When three decades after H. G. Wells made his comment about Aśoka, D. C. Vijayawardhana in Sri Lanka wrote in 1953, "Aśoka was the Lenin of Buddhism, as he was the first to translate the Buddha's Way of life into a polity." (Revolt in the Temple 1953). Probably Vijayawardena had believed everything that was written in the Pali chronicles about Aśoka, and Edwin Arnold on Buddhism, in total ignorance of the real Ashoka. Indian 'history' as we know it today, was first written by Europeans. They colonized the Indian past the way they wanted it to have been. They had this opportunity because Indians had never recorded their past, the way the Europeans wanted it. People living in the Indian subcontinent had never bothered, nor had they thought it was important, to record their 'history'. Perhaps we have all been looking at all the writings about Aśoka in the same manner in which Mahatma Gandhi saw the Bhagavat Gita, the way he wanted to see it. We are looking at Aśokan inscriptions translated after more than 2000 years, by a few people who were strangers to the country and her people. More importantly, it could have been almost impossible for them to try to imagine how the inscriptions were composed, how they were dispatched, how they were inscribed, why there are discrepancies, how the contents were read, received and accepted by the common people. And also what would have been the feedback from the officials and the people. The edicts are the only record we have from his time. All other writings are from much later times, and most of them totally unreliable, based on hearsay, based on early legends, and often written with other motives. Some studies on pre-Buddhist and pre-Aśokan times have been based on Buddhist Jataka stories. This is an instance where narrative was used to build a historical record, while more often narratives are built on historical records. The Sri Lanka Pali chronicles, Dipavamsa and Mahavamsa cannot be accepted as antiquarian. They were a collection of legends recorded in the present (4th and 5th cent. C.E.) to fulfill the needs of the rulers and the Buddhist Sangha at the time We may never know why historical records ignore certain issues. Indians ignored and failed to record Alexander and his invasion. It may have been because the invasion had never happened, or the Indians did not want to accept the effect it had on India. In the same manner the Pali chronicles ignored the Kalinga war by Aśoka. Once again it may not have happened or because the war did not agree with Aśoka's 'conversion' to Buddhism. Greeks never mentioned Aśoka's ambassadors. Aśoka never mentioned Mahinda and Sangamitta or their mission to Lanka. Are we to take them as arguments from silence or arguments from ignorance? Though it is believed even today that Seleucus sent Megasthenes as ambassador to Chandragupta, Antiochos I (son of Seleucus) sent Daimachus of Platae as ambassador to Bindusara, and Dionysius as ambassador sent by Ptolemy Philadelphus, according to Pliny (Natural History VI 58), the Indian writers have not mentioned them, in the same manner they did not mention Alexander, and no ambassadors are mentioned in the Aśokan court, from any other country, except from Lanka, which was also mentioned only in the Pali chronicles. Chandragupta is said to have been educated in Taxila, and if we are to believe that Chanakya arranged it, Chandragupta's education would have been the same as for a royal child, a heir apparent, trained in warfare, war strategy, administration and other royal duties. Yet we do not have information about the education of Bindusara or Aśoka. If they did not receive such a formal education, they may not have been capable rulers, or fighters, and it could also explain the decline of their empire, after Chandragupta. We do not have any evidence even if they had been literate. Chandragupta‟s biography was created by the British, selectively picking from secondary and tertiary Greek sources, and from a drama produced about eight centuries after Chandragupta. Alexander was a hero, a great warrior, while Chandragupta was „an oriental despot‟, who was greatly influenced by Alexander. Since

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ISSN: 2582-1962 Cape Comorin Volume II Issue II July 2020

An International Multidisciplinary Double-Blind Peer-reviewed Research Journal the Indian academics and even politicians were happy with Aśoka, perhaps they had not bothered to try to find the historical Chandragupta. Thus they accepted that Chandragupta was Sandrocottus, and the connection with Alexander. “Graeco-Roman authors always discuss Chandragupta within the framework of Alexander's conquests and the struggles of the diadochs. In a way, the connection between Chandragupta and Alexander can be considered as a literary trope.” (Fauconnier, 2015 p. 124-125) Fauconnier states “When broadly surveying the available evidence, however, we cannot but conclude that Alexander's invasion in India was ephemeral - the Greek sources make clear that he did not penetrate deep into the subcontinent and that his stay did not last for more than a few years. The utter silence of the India sources points to the same conclusion. (Fauconnier 2015, p 160) All we know about Alexander is from what was recorded by his own people, who would have tried to create a great war hero. Other than his courage, cunning and fighting skills, there is no evidence that Alexander was able to hold and rule the land he had captured. Even if he had invaded the sub-continent, he may not have been able to hold it, and thus may have not made any impact among the people, which could explain the silence about Alexander in any Indian literature. If we can imagine all the deaths, pain and suffering of his victims, then Alexander was never a great hero, but an evil person responsible for one of the largest genocides of his time, who also failed to rule the land he conquered. If what is called the Maurya Empire was the very first empire in South Asia, then the credit should go to Chandragupta, because it was he who was able to bring both the Indus and the Ganges plains under one rule. Yet, if Chandragupta had inscribed any edicts, he would have called himself a raja, just as Aśoka did, and never as an emperor, or rajadiraja or chakravarti. Such concepts had grown much later. But “the king list of the Purana calls the first Nanda king as 'Ekacchatra' bringing under one umbrella, and already an empire before Chandragupta came to power.” (Fauconnier, 2015. p 162) According to Buddha's own teaching, we cannot accept what was written many centuries later. We should not repeat "evam me sutan" (thus I have heard). We should try to be "ehipassiko", (see for ourselves).