Oriental Mythology by Joseph Campbell

Author:Joseph Campbell [Campbell, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mythology, Comparative Religion, History, Asian Religion, Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Ancient Egypt
ISBN: 9781611780024
Publisher: PublishDrive
Published: 2018-10-05T16:00:00+00:00

VIII. Three Buddhist Kings

AŚOKA MAURYA: C. 268–232 b.c.

Candragupta’s grandson was the great Aśoka, who reigned c. 268–232 b.c., and, continuing the course of victory, conquered the whole east coast of India from Orissa to Madras. When he beheld, however, the havoc of sorrow, misery, and death that his victory had caused, he was filled (like the young prince Gautama) with a deep sorrow, and, repenting of the nature of the world, joined the Buddhist Order as a lay disciple and the first Buddhist king. He is supposed to have supported 64,000 monks and to have built not only countless monasteries but also, in a single night, 84,000 reliquary shrines. Actually, about half a dozen of his fabled reliquary mounds (stūpas) survive to this day, increased so greatly in size, however, that we cannot judge of their Aśokan phase.

More instructive survivals from the decades of his reign are a series of seven heraldic stone columns, standing or fallen in various sites, bearing elegantly carved capitals in a highly polished Achaemenid Persian style. With the fall of the Persian empire and the burning of the palace city of Persepolis, “the accumulated artistry of Persia,” as Sir Mortimer Wheeler has put it, “was out of work,” and, moving eastward to the nearest successor empire, had reached Candragupta’s India,[Note II.5-39] where, in the Buddhist art of Aśoka’s time, a colonial flowering of the Achaemenid style produced the first stone monuments of what presently became one of the greatest sculptural traditions in the history of the world.

Let us note at this point, however, that all of the sites of the world’s first and foremost stone tradition, that of the Memphite priesthood of Ptah in Egypt, had been embraced, long since, within the bounds of the empires, first of Persia, then of Alexander the Great. Cambyses, the son of Cyrus, conquered Egypt 525 b.c., and the tomb of his successor, Darius I (reigned c. 521–485 b.c.), may be visited to this day outside the ruins of Persepolis, hewn, like the rock-cut tombs of the pharaohs (Abu Simbel and the rest), into a perpendicular rock wall. Six more such rock-cut mausoleums are in the neighborhood, one of which is unfinished; and these are attributed, respectively, to Xerxes I (485–465), Artaxerxes I (465–425), Darius II (424–404), Artaxerxes II (404–359), Artaxerxes III (359–338), and (the one unfinished) Arses (338–336) or, perhaps, the victim of Alexander, Darius III (336–330).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.