King Asoka and Buddhism - Urban Dharma

purpose has been religious edification. The emphasis by thevery nature of its primary objective has to be on either a religiouslesson such as the practical demonstration of the law ofkarma or the example of piety set by the chosen hero. Thusone looks in vain for evidence in the Aśokan Avadānas to corroboratethe information from other literary sources or fromarchaeological and epigraphical findings.The problem of historicity of these legends has becomefurther confounded by the fact that their actual hero was notAśoka. The great personage who emerges as the ultimate hero,“the remover of all doubts,” is Upagupta, the celebrated monk ofMathurā, who led Aśoka on a pilgrimage to holy sites, directedhis services to the cause of Buddhism, and was at hand to providehim with explanations on crucial happenings by relatingstories from past births.The overshadowing of Aśoka by Upagupta is patentlyclear in the later poetical Avadānas like Kalpadrumāvadānamālā,Aśokāvadānamālā, Dvāvimśatyāvadāna, Bhadrakalpāvadāna andVratāvadānamālā, where Aśoka more or less provides the occasionor audience or both for edifying religious discourses fullof legends which were delivered by Upagupta. The same tendencyhas persisted in Kṣemendra’s Avadānakalpalatā, whichbelongs to the mid-eleventh century and had been a popularwork in Tibet as revealed by its Tibetan translation.The Avadāna literature, to begin with, was not sectarian. 20But as it became a branch of literary activity more activelypursued by the Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna schools, the Aśokanlegends, or more precisely the Upagupta legends, gainedwide currency in the countries where these forms of Buddhismspread. As the Fourth Patriarch according to theirtradition (i.e. after Mahākāśyapa, Ānanda and Sāṇakavāsi),190