[Buddha-l] Asoka - Non violence?

[Eisel Mazard]

Having just looked it up now, the discussion of the same issues by
John S. Strong, 1989, is much better than I would have expected.
Starting at the bottom of p. 18, we have a very reasonable and
balanced survey of what the sources are in Pali and Sanskrit, and he
does (aptly) footnote that the reader should not assume that Sanskrit
equates to Mahayana, nor that Pali easily equates to Theravada.
However, as I have warned in the prior message, the extent to which we
regard the Asokāvadāna as historical evidence (if at all) is rather
more important than sectarian differences between the sources.

“…while the Mahāvaṃsa as a vaṃsa (a chronicle) is naturally concerned
with history and lineage, the Aśokāvadāna, as an avadāna (a legend) is
not; its focus is on the religious and psychological setting of its
story.  The importance of this difference in literary genre cannot be
overestimated.”
[Strong, 1989, p. 22, The legend of King Aśoka: a study and
translation of the Aśokāvadāna]

He proceeds to discuss the differing forms of bias (and, indeed,
differing literary inventions) found in these two examples of two very
different genres.

Reading all of this serves as a sort of reminder as to why so many
historians choose to treat the Ashoka of the inscriptions as the sole
source of information about the emperor (i.e., although ignoring the
rest of the evidence entails a sort of bias of its own).

E.M.