King Asoka and Buddhism - Urban Dharma

In the North Indian tradition, however, no mention is madeof any of these events. 11 There is no purge of the community,no reference to Moggaliputta Tissa, no talk of a Third Councilor of missionaries. Instead, Aśoka is said to rule one hundredyears after the parinirvāṇa, and prominence is given to hisrelationship with the Elder Upagupta, to his pilgrimage to thevarious important sites connected with the life of the Buddha,and to his holding of a pañcavārṣikā, a great quinquennial festivalof merit. As to Aśoka’s son Mahinda, no mention of himis made at all and place is given rather to the story of his sonKunāla. 12Much has been written discussing the significance of thesedifferences. The chronological discrepancies between the datesof Aśoka’s reign (B.E. 218 in the Sri Lankan tradition and B.E.100 in the North Indian), for example, have plagued historicallyminded scholars and led some of them to posit two datingsfor the Buddha’s parinirvāṇa — the commonly accepted483 (or 486) B.C.E. of the Theravadin era, and the increasinglyrespected 368 B.C.E. of the North Indian Sarvāstivādin reckoning.13 Moreover, the North Indian tradition’s complete silenceabout the Third Council at Pāṭaliputta has led some to doubt orto reevaluate its very historicity, 14 while the lack of referencesto Aśoka’s son Mahinda has occasioned some jaded commentsabout the prominence given to him in Sri Lankan texts.Despite these major divergences, however, a number ofparallels do exist between the two recensions of the Aśokalegend, and it is these that I wish to focus on in the first partof this paper. I do so not in an attempt to recapture the exacthistory of the events discussed so much as to discover thepaticularistic biases and perspectives of the texts discussingthem. For, as we shall see, the Sinhalese chronicles and the144