XXXII. The 256 Nights of Aśōka

Abstract

In an article entitled “Vyuthena 256”, published in the Journal Asiatique, 1911, part 1, pp. 119–26, M. Sylvain Lévi has reopened the subject of that record of Aśōka which we have, in various recensions, at Sahasrām, Rūpnāth, and Bairāt in Northern India, and at the Brahmagiri hill, Siddāpura, and the Jaṭṭiṅga-Rāmēśvara hill in Mysore. He has taken us another step towards the right understanding of the record, by showing that the words misā and amisā, which stand in one of the opening clauses, cannot mean mṛishā, ‘in vain, wrongly’, and amṛishā, ‘not in vain, not wrongly’, and do not represent the ablatives of misha, ‘false appearance, fraud, deceit’, and its converse amisha, but stand for missā and amissā, Pāli forms of the Sanskṛit nominatives plural miśrāḥ, ‘mixed’, and amiśrāḥ, ‘not mixed’. But we cannot agree with him in taking the word dēva in the same clause as denoting ‘kings’: in a record of Aśōka dēva can only mean ‘a god’. Nor can we agree with him in his interpretation of the general purport of the record.