[Buddha-l] Asoka - Non violence?

[Eisel Mazard]

As always, the most fundamental question is of which textual sources
you're working from, and (no less fundamental) to what extent you
consider them to be historical evidence.

The Asokāvadāna is a drama; it contains many round numbers of people
being slaughtered by the protagonist, decapitations in the hundreds,
and so on, but should it be read as historical evidence any more than
Shakespeare's Hamlet?

Conversely, of course, the stone inscriptions were created with a
clear propaganda function, with a starkly different bias (but they are
definitely "historical evidence" of a certain kind).

The material on the inscriptions themselves is extremely well-trodden,
and, indeed, if you can read Pali, you can read the inscriptions for
yourself without too much effort, and there are special glossaries to
make the exercise even easier.  Woolner's (1924) _Asoka text and
glossary_ is now available at a very low price (reprinted in India),
and I assume it is in the public domain.  This is as close to fun as
research on dead languages gets.

In terms of what the available texts are, and how we know what they
are, I would note the existence of this source:

Mukhopadhyaya, Sujitkumar (Ed.), 1982, The Asokāvadāna: Sanskrit text
compared with Chinese versions, New Delhi : Sahitya akademi.

E.M.