Well; for nine and twenty years he held that vast empire warless; even though it included within its boundaries many restless and savage tribes. Certainly only the greatest, strongest, and wisest of rulers could do that; it has not been done since (though Akbar came near it). We know nothing as to how literature may have been enriched; some think that the great epics may have come from this time. If so, it would only have been recensions of them, I imagine. But in art and architecture his reign was everything. He built splendid cities, and strewed the land with wonderful buildings and monoliths. Patna, the capital, in Megasthenes' time nine miles long by one and a half wide, and built of wood, he rebuilt in stone with walls intricately sculptured. Education was very widespread or universal. His edicts are sermons preached to the masses: simple ethical teachings touching on all points necessary to right living. He had them carved on rock, and set them up by the roadsides and in all much-frequented places, where the masses could read them; and this proves that the masses could read. They are all vibrant with his tender care, not alone for his human subjects, but for all sentient beings. "Work I must…. that I may discharge my debt to all things animate." And how he did work without one private moment in the day or night, as his decrees show, in which he should be undisturbed by the calls of those who needed help. He specifies; he particularizes; there was no moment to be considered private, or his personal own.
And even then he was not content. There were foreign lands; and those, too, were entitled to his care. I said that the southern tip of India, with Ceylon, were within his sphere of influence: his sphere of influence was much wider than that, however. Saying that a king's sphere of influence is wherever he can get his will done, Asoka's extended westward over the whole Greek world. Here was a king whose will was benevolence; who sought no rights but the right to do good; whose politics were the service of mankind:—it is a sign of the Brotherhood of Man, that his writ ran, as you may say—the writ of his great compassion,—to the Mediterranean shore:—
"Everywhere in the dominions of Devanampiya Piadasi, and likewise in the neighboring realms, such as those of the Chola, Pandya, Satiyaputra and Keralaputra, in Ceylon, in the dominions of the Greek king Antiochus, and in those of the other kings subordinate to that Antiochus—everywhere, on behalf of His Majesty, have two kinds of hospitals been founded: hospitals for men, and hospitals for beasts. Healing herbs, medicinal for man and medicinal for beasts, wherever they were lacking, have been imported and planted. On the roads, trees have been planted, and wells have been dug for the use of men and beasts."
And everywhere, in all those foreign realms, he had his missionaries preaching the Good Law. And some of these came to Palestine, and founded there for him an order at Nazareth called the Essenes; in which, some century or two later, a man rose to teach the Good Law—by name, Jesus of Nazareth.—Now consider the prestige, the moral influence, of a king who might keep his agents, unmolested, carrying out his will, right across Asia, in Syria, Greece, Macedonia, and Egypt; the king of a great, free, and mighty people, who, if he had cared to, might have marched out world-conquering; but who preferred that his conquests should be the conquests of duty. Devanampiya Piadasi: the Gracious of Mien, the Beloved of the Gods: an Adept King like them of old time, strayed somehow into the scope and vision of history.
VIII. THE BLACK-HAIRED PEOPLE
Greece shone between 478 and 348,—to give the thirteen decades of her greatest spiritual brightness. Then came India in 321; we lose sight of her after the death of Asoka in the two-thirties, but know the Maurya Empire lasted its thirteen decades (and six years) until 185. Then China flamed up brilliantly under the Western House of Han from 194 to 64;—at which time, however, we shall not arrive for a few weeks yet.
Between these three national epochs there is this difference: the Greek Age came late in its manvantara; which opened (as I guess), roughly speaking, some three hundred and ninety years before:—three times thirteen decades, with room for three national flowerings in Europe—among what peoples, who can say?— We cannot tell where in its manvantara the Indian Age may have come: whether near the beginning, or at the middle. But in China we are on firm ground, and the firmest of all. A manvantara, a fifteen-century cycle, began in the two-forties B. C.; this Age of Han was its first blossom and splendid epoch; and we need feel no surprise that it was not followed by a night immediately, but only by a twilight and slight dimming of the glories for about thirteen decades again, and then the full brilliance of another day. Such things are proper to peoples new-born after their long pralaya; and can hardly happen, one would say, after the morning of the manvantara has passed. Thus in our own European cycle, Italy the first-born was in full creative energy from about 1240 to 1500: twenty-six decades;—whereas the nations that have held hegemony since have had to be content each with its thirteen.
And now to take bird's-eye views of China as a whole; and to be at pains to discover what relation she bears, historically, to ourselves and the rest of the globe.
Do you remernber how Abraham haggled with the Lord over the Cities of the Plain? Yahveh was for destroying them off hand for their manifold sins and iniquities; but Abraham argued and bargained and brought him down till if peradventure there should be found ten righteous in Sodom and Gomorrah, the Lord promised he would spare them. But ten righteous there were not, nor nothing near; so the Cities of the Plain went down.
I suppose the Crest-Wave rarely passes from a race without leaving a wide trail of insanity in its wake. The life forces are strong; the human organisms through which they play are but—as we know them. Commonly these organisms are not directed by the Divine Soul, which has all too little of the direction of life in its hands; so the life-currents drift downward, instead of fountaining up; and exhaust these their vehicles, and leave them played out and mentally—because long since morally—deficient. So come the cataclysmic wars and reigns of terror that mark the end of racial manvantaras: it is a humanity gone collectively mad. On the other hand, none can tell what immense safeguarding work may be done by the smallest sane co-ordinated effort upwards. If peradventure the ten righteous shall be found—but they must be righteous, and know what they are doing—I will spare, and not destroy, saith the Lord.