Resumo de Asoka The Great - Monisha Mukundan

Monisha Mukundan Asoka the GreatOne of India?s greatest monarchs. But he secured his kingdom by such great slaughter that he told his scribe, "First, Kartikeya, there?s no pride involved, nor humility; understand this. I speak of atonement, that is, if blood can ever be wiped away with words. We will engrave this message on volcanic rock, right here where the earth still reeks of slaughter. A hundred thousand courted death, mind you. The battlefield stank so that heaven had to hold a cloth to its nose. I trod this plain, dark and glutinous with gore, my chariot wheels squelching in the bloody mire. Nothing stands now between them and destruction, neither moat nor bridge nor hut nor door-leaf. No lighted tapers call them to their village. It is to them that you will speak, or rather I will speak through you. So don?t enunciate the law of piety, no aphorisms which say good is difficult and sin easy. And no palaver about two peafowl and just one antelope roasting in my kitchen instead of an entire hecatomb as in my father?s days. There may be huts where they have nothing to burn on the hearth-fires. Spare me the shame?.So listen with care, Kartikeya, and I will tell you what to write. First talk about the sorrows of conquest and other miseries attendant on enslavement. In all lands live Brahmins, anchorites and householders, each enmeshed in the outer skin of relationships, that network of duty and herd impulse through which each charts his particular furrow, and the sword falls on such people and their children are blighted, remains undiminished. Mark that, don?t talk merely of rapine and slaughter but also of separation from loved ones. And about my sorrow, what will you say? How will you touch that weed-ridden lake-floor of my despair and keep from drowning? Say simply that of all the people killed or captured, if the thousandth part were to suffer as before, the pain would overwhelm me. Tell them I have adjured pride, the lowest can abuse me now and I shall not answer. Let the dust of humility cover my head. Even the tribals, dark and bullet-headed, the blubber-skinned, the ones from whom our demons and yakshas have borrowed their faces, I invite to my fold. Let them turn from crime and their aboriginal ways and they will not suffer. Cut deeper than the cuts of my sword so that even as moss covers the letters they are visible. write whatever you chance on. Don?t look for a white-quartz boulder. Anything will do, a mass of trap rock or just a stone sheet. And the language simple, something the forest folk can understand. I am not speaking to kings, to Antiyoka and Maga or Aliksudra. And no high-flown language. I am not here to appease gods. Even they must be ignored for a while and their altar-fires turn cold. Men don?t have enough fuel to burn their dead" (p66-69). You can see his disillusionment with the religious way of India of his time. Indians today live, too, disillusioned. They have one big advantage Asoka did not have-Jesus is born, lived, died, and rose again, and this message is for them.

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