The Fall Of King Asoka

For a long time, people thought King Asoka to be nothing more than a myth. With several writings concerning him, each relayed too fantastical an image to be convincing as truthful, keeping him in a legendary status. This all changed in 1837, well over a thousand years after his death, when a scholar James Prinsep managed to translate writings on a stone pillar in Delhi. After several other scholars raced to translate similar writings all over the Indian landscape, it became known that this King Piyadasi was the same as King Asoka. Even with his history pieced together, Asoka’s history is still legendary. He started as a lowly person shunned by his own father and grew to be a ruler of a kingdom that had never seen complete unity. But indeed, …show more content…
The King, Bindussa, intended to appoint his son Sumisa as the new king, and wished this as he lay on his deathbed. Despite his last dying wishes, Asoka had the support of the King’s ministers, and they began to conspire of how to place him onto the throne. After some time and a confrontation, Asoka opted to simply kill his older brother Sumisa. Afterwards, the Tarantha texts state that Asoka killed six of his other brothers. It was then that Asoka’s youngest brother, Tissa, realized that the only way to spare his own life would be to desert his home and join a sect of Buddhist monks, in the process throwing away any chance he once had at claiming the throne. Finally, after four years of quarrelling and killing, Asoka thought himself safe from treason and formally crowned himself as the King of the Mauryan dynasty, with no threat of anybody usurping him.2 With his crown secured, Asoka decided to expand further by taking the Kingdom of the Three Kalingas, shortly known as Kalinga, on the nearby coast of the Bay of Bengal and roughly in modern-day Orissa.1 Asoka was shocked by the horrors of war he saw,3 and this doubtless made him wish to stay away from such bloodshed brought about by war in the future. But still, he was a ruler first, and as such he had to ensure that his people remained firmly under his …show more content…
Yet even though it has so much contained within it, Asoka’s strong internal bias begins to show in the first few lines, where he bans the holding of festivals, purely because he “sees much to object to”1 in them. He continues to paint himself as an enlightened person by telling of the decrease of animals slaughtered in his kitchens, yet his numbers are doubtless exaggerated, especially the “hundreds of thousands … killed every day,” with no way for a citizen to know.1 He then states that it is good to respect one’s parents, subtly combining with the view that he is the father of the people to keep any problems from escalating, as nobody wishes to disrespect their father. He even lends himself divine authority, by saying that since his coronation, heavenly sightings and visions have