King Asoka and Buddhism - Urban Dharma

in this by the fact that these sects had the suppport of the newly risencommercial class and the mass of the population was not antagonisticto them. In addition to this, the new beliefs were not violentlyopposed to the old and it was therefore possible to bring about acompromise. Thus Aśoka saw the practical advantage of adoptingthe idea of the Dhamma. 84 …It is indeed no paradox to say that Aśoka’s political use ofBuddhism did not exclude him from joining the ranks of thesincere believers…. 85We are of the opinion that Dhamma was Aśoka’s own invention….If his policy of Dhamma had been merely a recording ofBuddhist principles, Aśoka would have stated so openly, sincehe never sought to hide his support to Buddhism. 86 … There wasno doubt that he was a religious man. But it would appear thatuntil his later years he was not given to religious formalism. 87 …For Aśoka, Dhamma was a way of life, the essence of what he hadculled from the moral teachings of the various thinkers knownto him, and probably his own experience of life. 88 … The Dhammaof Aśoka emerges as a way of life incorporating a number ofideas and practices. 89 …In interpreting the term Dhamma we must beware of equatingit with the Buddhist Dhamma or any other accepted systemwhich was called by this generic term…. Dhamma was largelyan ethical concept related to the individual in the context of hissociety. In the propagation of his Dhamma Aśoka was attempting toreform the narrow attitude of religious teaching, to protect the weakagainst the strong, and to promote throughout the empire a consciousnessof social behaviour so broad in its scope, that no cultural groupcould object to it. 90 …If all the information that we have of Aśoka were confinedto the contents of the thirty-four edicts and other inscriptions,there could be no difficulty in accepting Romila Thapar’s ingenioustheory on the evolution of Aśoka’s Dhamma as a consciouseffort to solve the emerging socio-economic and cultural215