Ashoka · Politics
Ashoka’s Twelfth Rock Edict and its startlingly modern pluralism: honour all sects, never exalt your own faith by disparaging another, and understand that whoever attacks other sects out of devotion to his own does his own sect the gravest harm. The goal is <em>samavaya</em> - concord.
Ashoka ruled one of the most religiously varied realms the world had yet seen. Within his borders lived Buddhists, Brahminical Hindus, Jains, Ajivikas, followers of countless local cults, and more - each with its own teachers, rituals, and claims to truth, and no shortage of rivalry among them. A ruler in that situation faces a perennial temptation: to back one faith as the official creed and let the others fend for themselves, buying unity through favouritism. Ashoka refused. Though a committed Buddhist, he made a point of honouring and materially supporting all the sects, and he elevated the peaceful coexistence of religions into an explicit principle of his dhamma. In the Twelfth Major Rock Edict he set down what may be the ancient world’s most thoughtful statement of religious toleration - not a grudging truce, but a positive doctrine that the sects have something to gain from one another.
Ashoka’s prescription is not that people should abandon their convictions or blur every difference into a bland sameness. It is subtler: a discipline of speech and attitude. The root of harmony among sects, he says, is restraint in speech - the refusal to praise one’s own faith or attack another’s without good cause, and even then only with moderation. Better still, one should actively seek to learn from other traditions, hearing and honouring the teachings of others, because there is something of value in each. The aim is samavaya, concord or coming-together: a society in which the sects grow in their ‘essentials’ and in mutual regard rather than in mutual scorn. Ashoka does not ask for indifference to truth; he asks for humility about one’s grasp of it, and courtesy toward those who see it differently - a recognition that the man who reveres his own faith while respecting others thereby exalts both.
Ashoka did not leave toleration as fine words. He put the resources of the state behind it. He records making gifts and showing honour to ascetics and householders of every sect, not just his own. He famously endowed rock-cut dwellings in the Barabar hills for the Ajivikas - a rival ascetic order, not Buddhist at all - a piece of royal patronage for a group whose views he did not share. His dhamma-officers were charged with looking after the affairs of all religious communities. In an age when kings routinely fused throne and altar, championing one cult and suppressing others, Ashoka used his wealth and authority to hold the ring fairly among competing faiths. He grasped that genuine toleration is not mere absence of persecution but active, even-handed respect - and that a ruler proves his impartiality not by what he says about the sects but by how he treats the ones he personally rejects.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that in the Twelfth Rock Edict Ashoka honoured all sects, condemned praising one’s own by disparaging others, held that the sectarian who attacks other faiths harms his own, and set concord (samavaya) as the goal. Explain his argument for toleration and why it was so far ahead of its time.
Leads to Cyrus the Great.
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