The Maurya Empire

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Around 322 BCE a young commander named Chandragupta, backed by the brahmin strategist remembered as Kautilya or Chanakya, drove the last of the Nanda kings from the throne of Magadha and took the great river-city of Pataliputra for himself. The kingdom he seized sat on the lower Ganges, on the floodplain where the Son meets the larger river near modern Patna, and it was already the richest and most martial power of the northern plain. Within a generation the house he founded would push its writ from the mouths of the Ganges to the passes above the Khyber, and from the foothills of the Himalaya nearly to the southern tip of the peninsula — the first time a single authority held most of the Indian subcontinent at once. The dynasty took its name from his line, the Mauryas, and the state it built lasted from that founding stroke until roughly 185 BCE.

The founder and the science of rule

The capture of Magadha was not an isolated coup but the culmination of a long northeastern drift of power. Magadha had been the dominant kingdom of the Ganges plain for two centuries, its wealth resting on iron, river trade, war elephants, and a fertile alluvial heartland. The Nandas who held it before Chandragupta were proverbially rich and proverbially hated; their fall opened the way for a conqueror with a coherent doctrine of statecraft behind him.

That doctrine is preserved, at least in part, in the Arthashastra, the great Sanskrit treatise on government, war, taxation, espionage, and the management of land and people, attributed by tradition to Kautilya — the same minister who is said to have made Chandragupta king. The text as it survives is composite and was reworked over centuries, so it cannot be read as a literal manual of the first Mauryan court. But it transmits the intellectual world in which that court operated: a vision of the state as a machine to be tuned, in which a king extends and holds power through a calculus of allies and enemies arranged in concentric circles, through informers and revenue officers, through the steady extraction of a share of every harvest. Rule here is a craft with its own technical vocabulary, and the king is its practitioner. The Maurya state was the first in the subcontinent built on something like this principle — administration as an applied science rather than a personal household writ large.

The reach of that state is confirmed from the outside. When the Macedonian conquest of the Achaemenid east broke apart and Seleucus I Nicator tried, around 305 BCE, to recover the Indian frontier that Alexander had briefly touched, he met Chandragupta and came off the worse for it. The settlement that followed, concluded about 303 BCE, handed the Mauryas the satrapies of the northwest — Arachosia, Gedrosia, the Paropamisadae, the lands around modern Kandahar and Kabul and Baluchistan — in exchange for five hundred war elephants and a marriage alliance between the two houses. The elephants would later help decide a battle for the Greek throne far to the west; the territory gave the Mauryas command of the trade and invasion routes through the mountains.

Out of that diplomatic settlement came one of antiquity’s most valuable outside witnesses. Seleucus sent an ambassador, Megasthenes, to reside at Pataliputra, and Megasthenes wrote an account of India, the Indica, that is now lost but survives in long quotations preserved by later Greek writers. Through him the Mediterranean world learned of the capital’s wooden walls and its many gates and towers, of a society he tried to sort into seven hereditary classes, and of a king surrounded by guards and spies. His report, read against the indigenous evidence, gives the Maurya state a double documentation — seen at once from within its own tradition of governance and from the eyes of a foreign envoy.

Chandragupta’s own end belongs to a different register. The Jain tradition holds that he abandoned the throne late in life, became an ascetic under the teacher Bhadrabahu, and went south to Shravanabelagola in Karnataka, where he ended his days by the rite of fasting to death. That a founder of empire should be claimed by the most rigorously renunciant of the subcontinent’s traditions is itself characteristic of the period: the same century that produced the most ambitious state also held that the highest act a man could perform was to walk away from the world entirely.

Bindusara and the southern reach

Chandragupta was succeeded around 297 BCE by his son Bindusara, whom Greek sources call Amitrochates — a rendering of a title meaning the slayer of enemies. His reign is thinly recorded, overshadowed on one side by the founder and on the other by his own son, but it was under him that Mauryan power consolidated and very likely pushed deep into the Deccan, into the dry plateau south of the heartland. By the end of his life the empire stood across nearly the whole subcontinent except for the far south, where the old Tamil kingdoms — among them the Pandya line at Madurai — remained outside Mauryan control, named in the edicts as neighbors rather than subjects. Bindusara kept up the contact with the Hellenistic world that his father had opened; a famous anecdote has him writing to the Seleucid court to request sweet wine, dried figs, and a philosopher.

Kalinga and the conversion of a king

His son Ashoka, consecrated to the throne around 268 BCE after what some accounts describe as a contested succession, is the figure through whom the whole empire is now seen, because he left more of his own words behind than any other ruler of the ancient world east of the Mediterranean. The pivot of his reign — and the moment he chose to make the center of his public memory — was a war of conquest against Kalinga, the independent kingdom on the eastern coast in what is now Odisha, fought about 261 BCE in the eighth year after his consecration.

The war was won. By the king’s own later reckoning, carved into rock for his subjects to see, a hundred thousand people were killed in the campaign, a hundred and fifty thousand were carried off, and many times that number died in its aftermath. What is remarkable is not the scale of the slaughter, which other conquerors recorded with pride, but what the conqueror did with it. In the thirteenth of his Major Rock Edicts, Ashoka set down not a boast but a statement of remorse — that the suffering of the conquered weighed on him, that the killing and deportation of even a fraction of those numbers grieved him, and that he now considered the only true conquest to be conquest by dhamma. No earlier monarch is known to have publicly repudiated his own victory.

This was the turn that made Ashoka the great royal patron of Buddhism. He drew close to the Buddha’s teaching and to the monastic community, the sangha; he is associated by tradition with the enlargement of the order’s reach across and beyond his realm. He is remembered as the patron of the Third Buddhist Council held at Pataliputra, and as the king who sent his own son Mahinda to carry the teaching to the island of Sri Lanka, where it took root at Anuradhapura and the cutting of the Bodhi tree from Bodh Gaya was planted — the lineage of relics and trees and councils through which the Theravada of the south traces itself back to his reign. The temple that later rose over the site of the awakening at Bodh Gaya, the Mahabodhi, preserves in its name the same event his missions carried abroad. Through these missions the Maurya state became the vehicle by which a regional teaching of northern India began its long expansion into a religion of much of Asia, the seedbed from which both the southern transmission and the later currents of the Mahayana would grow.

The architecture of dhamma

Yet Ashoka’s dhamma, the program he proclaimed across the empire, was not simply Buddhist doctrine handed down by decree. It was a public ethic of conduct, framed so that no community of the realm could object to it. Its principles, as he stated them, were restraint from killing living things, kindness to servants and dependents, generosity to brahmins and to the wandering ascetics alike, obedience to parents and elders, truthfulness, and above all toleration between the many sects — the insistence that one should honor another’s teaching rather than disparage it, since to exalt one’s own creed by attacking another’s is to injure one’s own. The word dhamma here carries the older sense of cosmic and social order shared across the subcontinent’s traditions, the same root that the brahmanical and Hindu world named dharma. Ashoka could be a sincere lay follower of the Buddha in his private devotion and still address his whole empire — brahmin, Buddhist, Jain, Ajivika — in a vocabulary none of them could refuse.

He made this ethic a function of government. He appointed officers of dhamma, the dhamma-mahamattas, charged with overseeing welfare and the fair treatment of prisoners, the elderly, and religious communities of every kind. He spoke in the edicts of planting shade trees and digging wells along the roads, of providing medical care for people and animals, of his own renunciation of the royal hunt. And he turned the surfaces of his empire into a medium of communication unlike anything that had come before it in India: he had his proclamations engraved on living rock and on tall polished sandstone pillars set up at sites across the realm. The edicts speak in the first person, in the voice of a king calling himself Devanampiya Piyadasi — Beloved of the Gods, Of Gracious Mien — addressing his subjects directly about how they and he should live.

The reach of these inscriptions is itself a map of the empire and a record of its languages. Most were cut in the Brahmi script, the ancestor of nearly every later writing system of India and Southeast Asia; in the northwest they appear in Kharosthi; and at the empire’s far western edge, near Kandahar, Ashoka spoke to a population shaped by the Greek and Persian worlds in their own tongues. The bilingual rock at Chehel Zina, carved around 260 BCE in both Greek and Aramaic, is among the earliest of all his inscriptions, and one of the most striking documents of the meeting between India and the Hellenistic Mediterranean — an Indian king proclaiming an Indian ethic of piety to his subjects in the language of Athens. In Rock Edict 13 the same king names the Greek rulers of his day — the Seleucid, the Ptolemaic, and others of the western kingdoms — as the distant recipients of his envoys of dhamma, fixing the Maurya Empire firmly within the connected world of the third century BCE.

The machine of empire

Behind the moral language of the edicts stood one of the most elaborate administrations the ancient world produced. The empire was governed from Pataliputra through a layered bureaucracy. Great provinces radiated from the center, each typically placed under a royal prince as viceroy — Taxila in the northwest, Ujjain in the west, Tosali in conquered Kalinga, Suvarnagiri in the southern Deccan. Below the provinces ran a hierarchy of district and local officers, surveyors of land, collectors of revenue, and the inspectors whom both the indigenous tradition and Megasthenes describe moving through the realm as the eyes and ears of the king.

The state’s strength rested on its capacity to count and to tax. Its principal revenue was a share of the agricultural produce of the land, supplemented by tolls, fines, the proceeds of state-run enterprises, and the wealth of trade along the great roads that bound the empire together — the route running from the northwestern frontier down to Pataliputra and on toward the east coast being the artery of the whole structure. A large standing army, with its famous corps of war elephants, guarded the frontiers and held the provinces. Megasthenes reported an enormous force under the king’s command, and whatever the exact figures, the Maurya state plainly fielded the largest organized army the subcontinent had yet seen. The same surplus that fed the army paid for the artisans who cut the lustrous, mirror-polished sandstone of the pillars and capitals — the lion capital that once crowned the column at Sarnath, near where the Buddha first taught, being the supreme achievement of Mauryan stonework and now the emblem of the modern Indian republic.

This was a state that conceived of its territory as an integrated whole to be administered, surveyed, taxed, and addressed — not merely a collection of tributaries paying homage to an overlord. Its ambition of reach, both physical and moral, was without precedent in the region. Nothing on this scale had stood here since the cities of the Indus Valley two millennia earlier, and the Maurya model of a bureaucratic empire centered on the Ganges plain would echo through every later attempt to unify the subcontinent.

The sources and their reading

The empire is reconstructed from three uneven bodies of evidence, each with its own bias, and the modern picture of it is the work of fitting them together. The first is Ashoka’s own corpus of inscriptions — the most direct testimony any ancient Indian polity left of itself — gathered and edited critically by Eugen Hultzsch in Inscriptions of Asoka, the first volume of the Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum (Clarendon Press, 1925), still the standard scholarly edition of the rock and pillar texts. The second is the indigenous tradition of statecraft, above all the Arthashastra, now most fully accessible in Patrick Olivelle’s annotated translation, King, Governance, and Law in Ancient India (Oxford University Press, 2013), the first complete English rendering in nearly half a century and one that uses the inscriptional and archaeological record to date the text. The third is the outside view of Megasthenes, whose lost Indica survives only in the fragments quoted by later Greek authors, collected and translated by J. W. McCrindle in Ancient India as Described by Megasthenes and Arrian (1877), still the most-cited English assembly of those passages.

Modern scholarship turns chiefly on how to read the edicts. Romila Thapar’s Asoka and the Decline of the Mauryas (1961) reframed dhamma not as a confession of personal faith but as an instrument of imperial cohesion — a civic morality designed to bind a heterogeneous realm — and argued that the empire’s collapse owed more to administrative and economic strain than to any pacifist enervation. Nayanjot Lahiri’s Ashoka in Ancient India (Harvard University Press, 2015) sets the inscriptions against the archaeological record of the period, tracing the king through the physical traces of his reign. Between the king’s stone proclamations, the manual of the state, and the ambassador’s report, the Maurya Empire stands among the most fully documented polities of its age in the subcontinent, and each generation of historians has read its evidence anew.

Decline and dissolution

Ashoka died around 232 BCE, and the empire did not long keep its full extent. The reasons are debated. The older view held that the king’s pacific dhamma had sapped the martial vigor of the state and alienated a brahmanical establishment displeased by his patronage of the heterodox traditions; later scholarship has been skeptical of so tidy a moral, pointing instead to structural strain. An empire held together by a highly centralized bureaucracy and the personal authority of its ruler is fragile at the top: a succession of weaker kings, the cost of maintaining so vast an apparatus, the difficulty of governing a territory of such diversity from a single distant capital, and a partition of the realm among contending heirs all loosened the bonds that Ashoka’s authority had drawn tight.

As the center weakened, the periphery fell away. The northwest, the empire’s window on the Hellenistic world, came under pressure from the Greek kingdoms of Bactria pushing back across the mountains that the Mauryas had won from Seleucus four generations earlier. Province by province, the writ of Pataliputra contracted toward its Magadhan core. The end, when it came around 185 BCE, was sudden and intimate: the last Mauryan king, Brihadratha, was struck down by his own commander-in-chief, the brahmin general Pushyamitra, during a review of the army. Pushyamitra took the throne and founded the Shunga dynasty in his own name, and the line of Chandragupta, after roughly a century and a third, was gone.

What that line had achieved did not depend on its survival. In the span of four reigns the Maurya state had established that the subcontinent could be governed as one — that a single administration could reach from the Hindu Kush to the Tamil border, that taxation and bureaucracy and law could bind a territory of that size together, and that a king could speak directly to all his subjects at once. And in the words Ashoka left carved across that territory, it had produced something stranger and more durable than any conquest: a ruler at the head of the largest empire his world had known who chose to record, for all who came after, that the only victory worth the name was the one won without the sword.

→ In the library: Buddhist Suttas (Rhys Davids, 1881) · Buddhism in Translations (Warren, 1896)

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