 REVIEWS

Ashoka’s Dream Philip Grant considers the relevance of the emperor Ashoka to our own age of global discontent

To Uphold the World:A Call for a New Global Ethic from Ancient India Bruce Rich Beacon Press, 2010 ISBN: 9780807006139

Emperor Ashoka, Indian School

Private Collection/Dinodia/The Bridgeman Art Library

Ashoka renounced the primacy of force and wealth as the currency of empire

To Uphold the World is much more than a scholarly re-examination of a legendary leader who extended his empire’s influence from Egypt to China. It is also a persuasive call for our own generation to challenge the central assumptions behind economic globalisation and replace them with policies grounded in an ethics of reverence and transcendence. If we attempt to do this muchneeded work, the Dalai Lama writes in an afterword to this book, “To Uphold the World should serve as a source of great inspiration.”

Bruce Rich was moved to write his study of Ashoka after visiting the famous battlefield of Dhauli in Orissa, India, where hundreds of thousands perished during the annexation of the republic of Kalinga in 261 BCE. A wellknown environmental lawyer and the author of Mortgaging the Earth, an insightful study of the World Bank, he was stunned to learn that after the slaughter at Dhauli, Ashoka renounced the primacy of force and wealth as the currency of empire in order to embrace policies based on veneration, compassion and nonviolence.

Rich suggests that re-examining the thinking behind Ashoka’s change of heart might allow our own generation to similarly reverse course. He believes this is necessary because champions of globalisation commit terrible violence by assuming that questions of global policy can be answered through first calculating their consequences and then following the ethic that the end justifies the means. This leads policymakers to tackle global problems with complicated institutional mechanisms powered by greed and fear, like the WTO and NATO.

Ashoka’s immense, multicultural empire was originally constructed upon a similar set of assumptions. The chief architect of the state Ashoka inherited had written a comprehensive manual of government in which he declared: “material wellbeing alone is supreme … for spiritual good and sensual pleasures depend upon material wellbeing”. As in today’s world, public policy was conducted through a combination of self-interest and coercion.

After the Kalinga War, Ashoka “attempted to transcend [this] view … through a new social ethic and politics of nonviolence and reverence for life”. In doing so he completely refashioned the traditional model upon which Indian kingship was based. Ashoka proclaimed performance of moral duty rooted in compassion as the primary value to be attempted by each member of his realm. Since people are deeply connected with each other and with every form of life, their social ethics must encourage them to create communities that “expand simply as an environment in

58 Resurgence & Ecologist

November/December 2012