The Maurya Empire (322–185 B.C), ruled by the Mauryan dynasty, was geographically extensive, powerful, and a political military empire in ancient India. The great Maurya empire was established by Chandragupta Maurya and this empire was flourished by Ashoka the Great. At its greatest extent, the Empire stretched to the north along the natural boundaries of the Himalayas, and to the east stretching into what is now Assam. To the west, it reached beyond modern Pakistan, annexing Balochistan and much of what is now Afghanistan, including the modern Herat and Kandahar provinces. The Empire was expanded into India's central and southern regions by the emperors Chandragupta and Bindusara, but it excluded a big portion of unexplored tribal and forested regions near Kalinga which was won by Ashoka the Great.
Shortly after the passing of Alexander, India's first great empire arose, ruled by Chandragupta Maurya. According to legend, Chandragupta Maurya was the son of a herdsman. When he was a young man he met Alexander the Great, and days later he was awakened by a lion gently licking his body -- an omen that he would become royalty.
Chandragupta's counselor and advisor was his adoptive father, Chanakya, who is said to have kept Chandragupta's youthful impulses in check and to have been learned in medicine, Hellenism and Zoroastrianism. And it is said that he guided Chandragupta in a bloody war that began two years after Alexander left India, a war that ended with Chandragupta overthrowing the Nanda dynasty that had been ruling the state of Magadha.
Chanakya became Chandragupta's Prime Minister, and legend describes Chanakya (Kautilya) as the author of a book entitled Arthasastra, which appears to have been written during the time of Chandragupta but with writings added centuries later. Arthasastra means science of property and material success, and in the book this success includes political and diplomatic strategy aimed at uniting India
The book advises a king to control his subjects, especially his ministers, and the Brahmins, wealthy merchants and his beautiful women. And to help in this, according to the author, the king should employ an army of various artful persons as spies who keep watch at all levels of society. Arthasastra advises a king to be energetic, ever wakeful, to make himself accessible to his subjects and to guard against six enemies: anger, greed, lust, exuberance, hauteur and vanity. But foremost is the book's advocacy of military expansion.
Life in and around Chandragupta's Capital
Chandragupta's capital was Pataliputra (today, Putra), a city nine by two miles, surrounded by walls of timber, 570 towers, a moat 900 feet wide and 30 feet deep. The wealthy of Pataliputra had sumptuously furnished homes surrounded by gardens, fruit trees and ornamental ponds. They enjoyed festivals, gambling, horsemanship, horseracing, archery, swimming competition, and private parties on each other's terraces. They were literate, and their city had a university, where Brahmins taught grammar, rhetoric, economics and politics. Pataliputra also had trade guilds and schools that taught crafts and technical subjects.
An ambassador, Megasthenes, sent to Pataliputra by the Seleucus, described the people of Pataliputra as skilled in the arts, as having an abundance of nourishing food, a low incidence of thievery and people often leaving their houses and property unguarded. Megasthenes described the people of Pataliputra as uncomplicated in their manners, never drinking wine except at sacrifices, and as seldom going to court against one another.
According to Megasthenes, some upper class women received an education and some were recognized as accomplished in the arts, but he added that ordinarily Brahmins did not wish to educate their wives, believing that knowledge and learning were not for females. Megasthenes described a deterioration in the position of women accompanied by a rise in honor bestowed upon courtesans. He described a drop in the age at which females could be married, which was a better guarantee that a man would acquire a virgin. A man of twenty-four might marry a girl as young as eight, or a man of thirty might marry a twelve year-old -- marriages that were to be consummated when the bride matured.
Chandragupta as Autocrat, Sensualist and Martyr
The agricultural lands around the capital belonged to Chandragupta, which he "rented" for a quarter or sometimes a half of what was produced on them. And Chandragupta made those peasants working his fields exempt from service in his military or other obligations to the state.
Chandragupta divided his empire into districts, which were administered by his closest relatives and most trusted generals. Civil servants ruled various departments such as trade, taxation, mining, roads, and irrigation canals. His government held trade monopolies and owned slaughter-houses, gambling halls, mines, shipbuilding operations, armament factories and spinning and weaving operations. His government oversaw the standardization of weights, measures and coinage. It controlled prices and trade, including trade in liquor and prostitution. It obliged drinking places to have couches, scents, water and other amenities, and drinking places and "public houses" were not to be near each other.
Chandragupta feared revenge and assassins. Against these possibilities he had a network of spies. He expected authorities in various districts to know all comings and goings. People who were considered dangerous to his rule might disappear without a trace. He had food tasters to avoid being poisoned. And, like Shih Huang-ti, he never slept in the same bed two nights in succession.
Eliciting confessions by torture remained a normal method in police work. Punishment depended on class: Brahmin's were not tortured, but upon conviction of a crime they could be branded, exiled or sent to work in the mines. The low incidence of thievery described by Megasthenes might have been a result of the punishment for such a crime. Common people were executed for theft, for damaging property of the king, breaking into someone's home, evading taxes, injuring an artisan working for the state and many other crimes. Failure to meet a contract could lead to a fine if not a harsher penalty, as could incompetence in various forms of work, from washing clothes to treating the ill.
Toward the end of his more than twenty years of rule, Chandragupta surrounded himself with dancing girls and courtesans -- women who also worked as housemaids, cooks, garland makers, shampooers and who fanned Chandragupta or held an umbrella for him. He seldom left his palace, except for an occasional festival. But he remained a man of religion and concerned about his subjects. According to legend he was converted to Jainism by a sage who had predicted a twelve-year drought. With the drought came famine in place of the affluence described by Megasthenes. In an effort to combat the drought, Chandragupta, in 301 BCE, abdicated in favor of one of his sons, Bindusara, and he withdrew with the Jainist sage to a religious retreat in India's southwest. There, according to legend, while appealing to God for relief from the drought, he fasted to death.
The Buddhist Emperor, Ashoka
Bindusara, ruled for twenty-five years. He warred occasionally, reinforcing his authority within India, and he acquired the title "Slayer of Enemies." Then in the year 273 BCE, he was succeeded by his son Ashoka.who in his first eight years of rule did what was expected of him: he looked after the affairs of state and extended his rule where he could. Around the year 260 Ashoka fought great battles and imposed his rule on people southward along the eastern coast of India -- an area called Kalinga. The sufferings created by the war disturbed Ashoka. He found relief in Buddhism and became an emperor at least a little different in values from his father, grandfather and others. He was a Buddhist lay member and went on a 256-day pilgrimage to Buddhist holy places in northern India. Buddhism benefited from the association with state power that Hinduism had enjoyed -- and that Christianity would enjoy under Constantine the Great.
Ashoka had wells dug, irrigation canals and roads constructed. He had rest houses built along roads, hospitals built, public gardens planted and medicinal herbs grown. But Ashoka maintained his army, and he maintained the secret police and network of spies that he had inherited as a part of his extensive and powerful bureaucracy. He kept his hold over Kalinga, and he did not allow the thousands of people abducted from Kalinga to return there. He announced his intention to "look kindly" upon all his subjects, as was common among kings, and he offered the people of Kalinga a victor's conciliation, erecting a monument in Kalinga which read:
All men are my children, and I, the king, forgive what can be forgiven
Ashoka converted his foreign policy from expansionism to that of coexistence and peace with his neighbors -- the avoidance of additional conquests making his empire easier to administer. In keeping with his Buddhism he announced that he was determined to ensure the safety, peace of mind and happiness of all "animate beings" in his realm. He announced that he would now strive for conquest only in matters of the human spirit and the spread of "right conduct" among people. And he warned other powers that he was not only compassionate but also powerful.
Ashoka's wish for peace was undisturbed by famines or natural disasters. His rule did not suffer from the onslaught of any great migration. And during his reign, no neighboring kings tried to take some of his territory -- perhaps because these kings were accustomed to fearing the Maurya monarchs and thinking them strong.
The resulting peace helped extend economic prosperity. Ashoka relaxed the harsher laws of his grandfather, Chandragupta. He gave up the kingly pastime of hunting game, and in its place he went on religious pilgrimages. He began supporting philanthropies. He proselytized for Buddhism, advocating non-violence, vegetarianism, charity and tenderness to all living things.
Ashoka had edicts cut into rocks and pillars at strategic locations throughout his empire, edicts to communicate to passers-by the way of compassion, edicts such as "listen to your father and mother," and "be generous with your friends and relatives." In his edicts he spread hope in the survival of the soul after death and in good behavior leading to heavenly salvation. And in keeping with the change that was taking place in Buddhism, in at least one of his edicts Ashoka described Siddhartha Gautama not merely as the teacher that Siddhartha had thought of himself but as "the Lord Buddha."
Ashoka called upon his subjects to desist from eating meat and attending illicit and immoral meetings. He ordered his local agents of various ranks, including governors, to tour their jurisdictions regularly to witness that rules of right conduct were being followed. He commanded the public to recite his edicts on certain days of the year.
Ashoka's patronage of Buddhism gave it more respect, and in his empire Buddhism spread. More people became vegetarian, and perhaps there was some increase in compassion toward others. Ashoka
served harmony by pleading for tolerance toward Hindus and Jains. He worshiped no jealous god, and mindful of the close ties between Buddhism and Hinduism he claimed that the Brahmin's creed deserved respect, and he included Brahmins among his officials.
Not all Brahmins returned Ashoka's kindness. They were displeased with Ashoka's campaign against their sacrificial slaughtering of living creatures. But Ashoka's opposition to such sacrifices did please many among India's peasantry, whose flocks had long been plundered by local rulers seeking animals for their sacrifices.
Ashoka sent missionaries to the kingdoms of southern India, to parts of Kashmir in the northwest, to Persia, Egypt and Greece, but as Christians were to learn, old habits are not easily broken. Buddhism outside his kingdom took root only on the island of Lanka.
Work, taxation, class relations, government bureaucracy and village politics changed little, all of which -- like Ashoka's authority -- were considered the natural order of things. Whether prostitution had ended is unknown. In religion, old habits continued among Buddhists, as they looked to Brahmins to conduct those rites associated with births, marriages and deaths. Ashoka
attempted to resolve differences among the Buddhists -- as the Christian emperor Constantine would among the Christians -- but conflicts among the Buddhists remained and would grow.
In the final years of his reign, Ashoka withdrew from public life, and in 232 BCE -- after thirty-seven years of rule -- he died.
During the reign of his heirs the empire begin to split apart, including the breaking away of Kalinga
Collapse of the Maurya Empire
In 185 BCE, the rule of the Maurya family ended when an army commander-in-chief, Pusyamitra Sunga, murdered the last Maurya king during a parade of his troops. Pusyamitra's rise to power has been described, perhaps inaccurately, as a reaction by Brahmins to the Buddhism of the Maurya family. Nevertheless, the influence of state power on religion continued, with Pusyamitra supporting orthodox Brahminism and appointing Brahmins to state offices. And, with Pusyamitra's rule, animal sacrifices returned that had been prohibited under Ashoka and his heirs. Other matters outlawed by the Mauryas also returned, including musical festivals and dances
