Being the
land where multiple religions –founders lived; does anyone of you believe that
there exists a total utopian religious serenity in India, the presumed
‘lighthouse of the world’? Leave the present, do you believe such things
existed in ancient India? You must surely have heard someone speaking of a
grand ancient India where everything was perfect. Well then, here is the true
tale of religious intolerance, vandalism and 'communalism' in ancient India, the
land of god and god men (and god women too!).
Among her
121 billion humans, how many knows the fact that the most prosperous golden age
of India was Buddhist and not Hindu-based?
The
misconception that Hinduism glorified ancient India is dangerously and
extensively used today for many purposes; from the election campaigns of right
wing Hinduism-based parties to the spreading of a Hindu version of jihad by
fanatics is quite, what you say…… ya, LOL!
Chandragupta
Maurya, India’s first grand empire builder, though born as a Hindu, lived and
died as a true Jain follower.Asoka,
India’s first super emperor lived and died as a staunch Buddhist.Then how can
someone today say that India is a Hindu nation, right from the ancient times of
grand rulers and that all others are mere refugees?
Luckily, not
all have forgotten Buddhism’s gift to ancient India .They repaid a bit of it, at
least the forerunners of a free India who choose Buddha’s DHARMACHAKRA as the
coat of arms in India’s national flag and the four faced lion capital of Asoka
as the national insignia. Ah! At least the simple interest is paid back.
And when you
talk about India’s past, a distant past where time is not yet a metaphor, you
cannot skip the tales of Emperor Asoka, the greatest of them all. And that’s
what this book is about, recounting the lost tales of Asoka.
Can you
simply believe that almost 2000 years before mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela Or
Martin Luther King Jr., there once lived a great human, that too a powerful emperor,
who preached the idea of universal brotherhood, total peace and religious
equality, considering all the subjects of his empire equal irrespective of
their caste, creed, religion or financial background? Just know that his
Chinese, Arab, African and Greek contemporaries were behaving savagely, tearing
each other to pieces.
Charles Allen,
employing various solid examples prove how Asoka (literally a man without
sorrows) also known as ‘DEVANAMAPRIYAPRIYADASI’ in his edicts, qualifies to
become history’s first emperor to build his empire solely upon the basis of
religious unity and peace rather than continuous battles.
To know his greatness,
just think how many rulers of the world after him had achieved total religious
unity within their empires or kingdoms? Even now, is it happening in any of your
countries? Maybe, if you are from the Vatican or the Arabian Peninsula.
Historical records
show us that after the battle of kalinga, his empire almost doubled in size.
After that battle, he converted into Buddhism and then he never fought or
ordered any war in all his remaining life. Yet, never did the sovereignty of
his empire weaken. He even had strong political and religious ties established
with the kingdom of Tamrapani (modern day Sri Lanka).
So if any
one of you need to know the actual history of the Indian subcontinent, then go
for this book, which recounts how jealous aristocratic Hindu pundits were and
how they erased off India’s golden Buddhist history, to claim a Hindu based
utopia (to such an extent that people of
the 17th and 18th century believed that the Ashokan
pillars were the walking sticks of Bhīma, a central character in the epic
Mahabharata!!!)
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