Introduction

This article intervenes in contemporary debates about whether the third-century bce Mauryan emperor Aśoka, who advocated religious toleration, can be described appropriately as a secularist. The first part reviews these debates as well as the limited evidence concerning Aśoka's policy of toleration. The second part redescribes the history of religious toleration in Europe in order to clarify what we ought to mean by both ‘secularism’ and ‘civil religion’, both of which have been applied to Aśoka's Dhamma. The third and final part returns to consider some evidence that tends to show that Aśoka, if he can indeed be described as a secularist at all, was closer to the Hobbesian variety, in the sense that he advocated Dhamma as a universal ethic or civil religion within the context of a state establishment of religion.

Aśoka as both lens and projection screen for contemporary debates over secularism

The third-century bce Mauryan emperor Aśoka (r. 268–232 bce) has attracted attention since the discovery of his numerous epigraphic remains that are scattered throughout his ancient kingdom as well as at its boundaries. The Mauryan dynasty (322–185 bce) was the first real imperial formation to span the subcontinent, and it included a diversity of languages and cultures, including religious cultures. Partly for this reason, Aśoka has been an example for a diverse, independent, and united India—in fact, the wheel or dharmacakra from his lion pillar at Sarnath served as an inspiration for the modern Indian flag. Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India, felt a special connection to him.Footnote ¹ This was true despite the fact that, while Nehru was committed to a secular Indian state, Aśoka supported the growth and development of Buddhism through a range of policies, described his own conversion to that religion after experiencing regret at his bloody conquest of the Kalinga region, and has gone down in legend as the archetype of a Buddhist ruler.Footnote ² To this day, secular liberal thinkers in India often draw a straight line from Aśoka to Nehru, one that is traced through Akbar.Footnote ³

The connection between Aśoka's religiously pluralist but Buddhist-influenced empire and contemporary India is reinforced by the evident parallel between the two states in terms of their geographic range and unity-in-diversity. It is supported also by the shared endeavour to negotiate and harmonize such pluralism through a robust doctrine of religious toleration. Aśoka's edicts called for members of all religions (pāṣaṇḍas) to be welcome throughout his empire, declared that members of different religions should exhibit restraint in speech and not insult other traditions, and articulated a universal ethic of Dhamma that, while it may not be specifically Buddhist,Footnote ⁴ shares with that tradition an emphasis on nonviolence and social welfare.

Aśoka's reputation as a proponent of toleration rests primarily upon a few inscriptions.

Rock Edict 7 states:

Rock Edict 12 states:

These policies went beyond mere toleration.Footnote ⁶ They included active support of different religious groups. Much as Akbar would do later with his policy of Sulh-i Kull, as described in Moin's framework article in this special issue, Aśoka promoted a diversity of persuasions and respectful discussion among members of different religions.Footnote ⁷

An interesting question concerns the meaning of the term pāṣaṇḍa (pāṣaṃḍa/praṣaṃḍa), which is usually translated as ‘religion’ or ‘sect’ and refers to different traditions of discipline or asceticism as well as to different worldviews.Footnote ⁸ Romila Thapar notes that pāṣaṇḍa in the Aśokan edicts ‘referred only to philosophical and religious sects or doctrines’, yet subsequently acquired pejorative connotations, similar to the English ‘sectarian’.Footnote ⁹ In Greek versions of the inscriptions, this term is rendered as diatribe.Footnote ¹⁰ Another general term for religions is the compound brāhmaṇa-śramaṇa, which refers to the distinct groups of Brahmans, or householders, and Śramaṇas, or ascetics, including Jains, Ājīvikas, and Buddhists.

Rock Edict 13 states:

Aśoka understood religions (pāṣaṇḍa) as something found in every society.Footnote ¹¹ The term pāṣaṇḍa presumably extended also to materialists and sceptics, such as were known to exist in those days in both India and Greece. A related term that is found in Aśoka's edicts is ‘Dhamma’, which was rendered in Greek versions as eusebia, meaning ‘piety’.Footnote ¹² Dhamma was a polyvalent term in Buddhism and Hinduism; it could refer to specific teachings or to a more general concept of righteousness. Aśoka used it to describe the ethics of his empire, as well as the ethics of different religions. The content and meaning of Aśoka's Dhamma is discussed further below.Footnote ¹³

A number of contemporary scholars have invoked Aśoka as the representative of a tradition of religious toleration that may be uniquely Indian, although, as described by some of its contemporary interpreters, it also bears affinities with our ideals of democratic deliberation. His policies anticipated modern notions of civil discourse between members of different religious groups, such as those affirmed by John LockeFootnote ¹⁴ or by Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code.Footnote ¹⁵ The example of a powerful ruler who embraced Buddhism and nonviolence (ahiṃsā), and tolerated different sects in a diverse and polyglot empire is indeed appealing and worthy of reflection. This may explain why Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum, and Gary Jacobsohn, among others, have drawn a parallel between Aśoka's empire and contemporary India.Footnote ¹⁶ Some, such as Sen, even go so far as to label this ‘secularism’:

Sen is not alone in this conclusion, and is joined by such scholars as Romila Thapar.Footnote ¹⁸ One of the strongest proponents of this idea has been the political philosopher Rajeev Bhargava, who claims Aśoka, with some caveats, as a forerunner of a distinctively Indian style of secularism, one that is tolerant and neutral with respect to the different religions in the nation.Footnote ¹⁹ Rather than a strict separation between religion and politics, as in the case of American secularism, or an exclusion of religion from the public sphere, as in the case of French secularism or laïcité, Bhargava argues that ‘the subcontinental or Indian model [of secularism that is] found loosely in the best moments of intercommunal practice in India and in the country's constitution appropriately interpreted’ promotes a form of ‘principled distance’ between the state and the various religions that, however, ‘does not erect a wall of separation’ between these.Footnote ²⁰ India exemplifies a secular state that goes beyond mere toleration of the different religious traditions, while treating each of these equally, a principle that has been referred to as sarva-dharma-samabhāva.Footnote ²¹ Of course, this cannot mean that there was an unbroken tradition extending more than two millennia which remained intact throughout the colonial period and that survives to the present day. We must therefore understand this as a claim that, given the underlying conditions of Indian pluralism, Aśoka's Dhamma has continuing value as a model for social organization. The attraction of such an indigenous model for contemporary India, and indeed for many other modern states in which communal violence attributed to religion is a problem, is self-evident. For this reason, not only historians and philologists but also philosophers and political theorists concerned to defend the modern settlement in favour of religious toleration and the religious neutrality of the state have reflected intensively on Aśoka's example.

Bhargava's account of the different varieties of secularism is nuanced and sensitive to the political, historical, and cultural contexts in which each of the varieties has organically grown up. He is concerned to refute the contention that secularism may be only a European shoot transplanted to Indian soil, where it remains alien and unproductive. This is why he has turned to native Indian models for toleration, such as Aśoka and the Mughal emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605 ce), about whom Azfar Moin writes in this special issue.Footnote ²² Given the problems of communal violence between Hindus and Muslims in contemporary India, one can only sympathize with Bhargava's defence of a secular India. Moreover, his argument that East and West have much to learn from each other is unimpeachable in its logic. Indian secularism, like its European and North American analogues, is of interest as a development of potentially broader significance. Indeed, we ought to accept Bhargava's challenge to reinterpret the Indian past, including Aśoka's empire and Dhamma, as a means to rethink secularism and to better understand and address our contemporary predicament. This is precisely what I propose to do here.

The problem is that Aśoka's legacy, like the legacy of European secularism, is ambivalent. It sends mixed messages or, if you prefer, can be read, and used, towards different ends. On the one hand, Aśoka appears as a secularist avant-la-lettre, who promoted a doctrine of live-and-let-live that was diametrically opposed to any form of fundamentalism, religious or otherwise. On the other hand, Aśoka appears as an establishmentarian, a patron of the early Buddhist community, who spread the Dhamma with missionary zeal. Whereas the former Aśoka can be invoked in support of the idea of a secular India, the latter Aśoka can serve as the model for an India that would be, in accordance with the orientation of the majority of its citizens (over 80 per cent), a Hindu Rashtra, albeit of a benevolent and tolerant sort.

At first glance, it would appear absurd to label Aśoka a ‘secularist’. As Ashis Nandy argues, ‘when the modern Indians project the ideology of secularism into the past, to say that Emperor Aśoka was “secular,” they ignore that Aśoka was not exactly a secular ruler; he was a practicing Buddhist even in his public life. He based his tolerance on Buddhism, not on secularism.’Footnote ²³ Jakob de Roover has argued further that secularism in India is a European import that emerged from Christian theological discourses, such as the Two Kingdoms or Two Swords doctrine, which invented the distinction between religion and politics.Footnote ²⁴ De Roover's views are discussed further below.

Bhargava rejects the claimed uniqueness of European secularism: ‘it is frequently argued that secularism is purely a Christian, western doctrine and therefore, cannot adapt itself easily to the cultural conditions of India … This necessary link between secularism and Christianity is exaggerated, if not mistaken.’Footnote ²⁵ His turn to Aśoka is an attempt to elaborate and demonstrate these claims.

To what extent is it appropriate to describe Aśoka as a ‘secularist’ avant-la-lettre? I am interested in exploring this question, and have no pretensions to add anything radically new to our historical understanding of Aśoka. Let me add a further caveat: I do not doubt that there are indigenous Indian precedents, Aśoka being among them, for negotiating pluralism and promoting toleration through models of civil discourse. India did not—and does not—need to be told by the West how to manage its indigenous diversity. I accept that it may be useful also for those of us who hail from other cultures to reflect upon Indian historical models. I agree with the point that Bhargava has made repeatedly—that words may always acquire or be given new meanings and applications in the course of time and that, when describing different cultures and historical periods, and using contemporary language to do so, what matters is not whether the target society possesses a matching word (in this case, an exact lexical equivalent of ‘secularism’) which, if taken narrowly, may be an ‘anachronism’ as applied to ancient India—but whether such society recognizes a similar ‘conceptual space’.Footnote ²⁶

Aśoka's Dhamma has been described variously, not only as a form of ‘secularism’ or ‘proto-secularism’,Footnote ²⁷ but also as a ‘civil religion’Footnote ²⁸ or ‘political theology’,Footnote ²⁹ as a ‘meta-religion’,Footnote ³⁰ and (by Bhargava) as a ‘public or political morality’.Footnote ³¹ It is difficult, at first glance, to reconcile all of these descriptions, although each may be true from its own perspective, just as in the story of the Blind Men and the Elephant, where the man who touched the tail thought it was a snake, the one who grasped the leg thought it was a tree, and so on. The cognitive dissonance here is a bit more direct, however, insofar as some of the most persuasive descriptions—such as the term ‘civil religion’—appear prima facie as oxymorons that combine terms drawn from realms ordinarily regarded as fundamentally distinct, that is, from the civil or political domain, on the one hand, and from religion, on the other. The strangeness of this compound has been blunted by the currency that the term has acquired in contemporary sociology through the influence of the late Robert Bellah, who described the rituals, myths, and symbols of the modern United States as a ‘civil religion’.Footnote ³² This familiar usage may actually obscure more than it illuminates, however, given the genealogy of the concept of ‘civil religion’ in a history of struggle between religion and secularism that goes back to Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau—that is, to the Reformation and Enlightenment, as outlined below. Briefly, within this tradition, civil religion was understood to be precisely something that was not separate from politics, but was regarded both as an indispensable reinforcement for the legitimacy of the state and as an ideology in competition with any other religion. In the last century, Carl Schmitt's term ‘political theology’ mounted a similar challenge to the claimed independence of secular liberalism from religion.Footnote ³³ According to Schmitt, the modern legal state (Rechtsstaat) had repressed recognition of the fact that its own fundamental principles were themselves drawn from a branch of Christian theology. Secular liberalism was therefore unable to ground itself. Both the category of ‘civil religion’ and Schmitt's concept of ‘political theology’ converge, to some extent, with the Böckenförde Dilemma, named after the German constitutional judge Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde (1930–2019), who argued that liberal democracies are incapable of commanding loyalty to their first principles, since this would convert them ipso facto into authoritarian regimes. He therefore argued the need for something like a universal ethic to serve as the glue for such societies.Footnote ³⁴

Aśoka appears to have recognized and resolved such problems through his concept of a universal Dhamma that would bind together all the subjects of his domain, no matter which religious praxis they followed. Although hardly a democrat in our sense, Aśoka did confront a version of the problem faced by modern liberal states, namely how to negotiate the condition of cultural and religious pluralism while promoting civic virtues and loyalty to the state. Aśoka's Dhamma would therefore appear to be a useful model for how to address our own contemporary dilemmas, not least of which has been the challenge either to the intellectual coherence of secularism as an idea or to its practical adequacy as a doctrine for guiding the behaviour of citizens.

The lesson of Aśoka is not yet clear. Although this is in large part due to the paucity of data concerning the Buddhist emperor, I suggest that another cause is the ambiguities or even potential contradictions in our categories of interpretation, which include both ‘secularism’ and ‘civil religion’. What I offer here is primarily an effort to clarify such modern concepts in light of what Aśoka has been taken to represent. Specifically, I will dispute the idea that secularism constituted, in the first instance, a separation between religion and politics, if not between church and state. This was only one of the trajectories that accompanied the process of secularization, and it was less important than the consolidation of power under the unitary nation-state, which occurred at the direct expense of the authority of the church. Exemplary of this development was Thomas Hobbes's seventeenth-century critique of what we call ‘religion’ as nothing other than politics under a different, and misleading, name. From one perspective, Hobbes's reduction of religion signalled the birth of the radical Enlightenment,Footnote ³⁵ or of a critical mode of thought that did not depend on any religious presuppositions. This is often what we mean when we use the term ‘secularism’ as a shorthand for scepticism, irreligion, or unbelief. From a political perspective, however, what matters is that Hobbes collapsed the church into the state, absorbing its ‘ghostly authority’ back into the body politic.Footnote ³⁶ This was the direct reference for Jean-Jacques Rousseau's idea of a ‘civil religion’ as a unification of religion with politics.Footnote ³⁷ Both philosophers understood this as a restoration of a unity that had been broken by the emergence of religion as an independent power, an event that had occurred either with the biblical Exodus or with the Gospels and the founding of the Christian Church. While this unification was, in a sense, the birth of secular modernity, it was also, in another sense, a return to the status quo ante, to either paganism or an earlier model of sacred kingship.Footnote ³⁸

The idea of a ‘civil religion’ is actually incompatible with secularism, if we take the latter to mean a separation between religion and politics, as Bhargava does. However, the definition of secularism in terms of separation is in itself problematic, because it is wedded to a theological genealogy with roots in biblical traditions as De Roover, among others, has argued, and cannot therefore be taken as a universal apodictic category relevant for all places, times, and cultures. The following section of this article sketches this genealogy, while showing how it coordinated with what I identify as the more basic and characteristic tendency of secularism, namely the centralization or unification of political power. Following this mainly European Christian history, I will turn back to Aśoka and offer a modest rereading of his Dhamma as a civil religion for a novel imperial formation. While one reason for the parallel between Aśoka and contemporary secularism is the shared condition of pluralism, another is the analogous effort to consolidate power under the control of the state, an effort that arguably requires precisely some form of civil religion to serve as the ‘glue’ that binds together the various members of the body politic. This glue may be necessary, especially in cases where, as today, the state has marginalized religious institutions as independent sources of authority. My conclusion will be that it does indeed make sense to describe Aśoka as a secularist, in Hobbesian terms, but that a proper understanding of what that means is scarcely compatible with our intuitive understanding of secularism as a separation of religion from politics.

The implications of our inability to stabilize the definition of secularism as separate from religion are profound. The present meditation on such categories shows that it is hardly enough to apply such terms as ‘civil religion’ to function as descriptions of Aśoka's Dhamma and leave it at that. Instead, it is necessary to be as rigorous with respect to the categories that we deploy as with respect to the data to which we apply them. This recognition is itself the threshold or boundary condition for the possibility of a true dialogue between cultures, which has never been a more urgent task than it is at this moment. It is certainly the case that ideas, both good and bad, can migrate across cultures. Neither cultures nor the meanings of words are static. It is also true that the meaning of a word such as ‘secularism’ is often malleable, being partly subject to the whims of the ruling authority. However, when a word is made to bear so much weight in the context of contemporary political pressures, the truth can begin to crack under the strain.

Separation isn't secular, and secularism isn't separation

The idea that secularism or freedom of religion requires a separation between church and state is a commonplace, found, for example. in Thomas Jefferson's famous call for a ‘wall of separation’.Footnote ³⁹ Bhargava follows such older definitions: ‘Broadly speaking, secularism, anywhere in the world, means a separation of organized religion from organized political power inspired by a specific set of values. Just as without separation there is no secularism, just so a value-less separation does not add up to secularism.’Footnote ⁴⁰ However, he proceeds to argue that an absolute separation is not necessary for all forms of secularism, since Indian secularism merely enforces a relative separation or ‘principled distance’ of the state from religion, whereas the strict separation of the functions of the church and state in the West has also coexisted with religious establishment, or the state's support of and preference for a particular church.

The idea of secularism as separation depends on a certain faith or confidence that we can, in fact, know and distinguish what ‘religion’ is as opposed to politics. This confidence may appear reasonably well-founded when religion is identified with the institutionalized forms of a church. However, in the case of Hinduism in India, there is no equivalent to the Roman Catholic Church or papacy.Footnote ⁴¹ Historical and anthropological studies have shown that what counts as ‘religion’ in the case of India has also changed over time, in accordance with broader conceptual changes as well as the strategic interests of individual actors. For several decades now, scholars of religion have called into question precisely our ability to define what ‘religion’ is, which has also served to destabilize our understanding of what ‘secularism’ represents. Although many political scientists, even those as perspicuous and theoretically sophisticated as Bhargava,Footnote ⁴² still tend to use the word ‘religion’ as if this denoted some clearly defined object, the thrust of the past 40 years in religious studies contradicts this usage.Footnote ⁴³ In the context of her study of toleration in colonial India, C. S. Adcock sums up the consequences of such debates:

Similarly, Hussein Ali Agrama argues that, rather than a determinate category, secularism is the ‘problem space’ in which the boundary between the religious and the secular is continually being redrawn.Footnote ⁴⁵

Part of this problematic, at least in colonial India, was inherited from Christianity. An example is the conversion of dharmaśāstra into ‘Hindu law’ during the colonial period. Historians such as Henry Maine used to argue that Hindu law, as represented by the Laws of Manu, was originally religious, being concerned, like the Hebrew Bible, with ritual matters.Footnote ⁴⁶ Such characterizations of dharmaśāstra followed earlier Christian parallels between Hindus and Jews, and reflected the idea that religious or ritual laws are not ‘proper’ laws, in that they are not rational, modern, and secular.Footnote ⁴⁷ This distinction between ‘(secular) law’ and ‘religion’, which was no more indigenous to Hinduism than it was to Judaism, was applied by the British to marginalize those aspects of dharmaśāstra that were regarded as ‘religious’, such as rituals for celebrating the annual festival of the goddess Durga, for the expiation of sins, for determining astrologically auspicious moments, and so on. Only a small remainder was incorporated into colonial law. The family law reserved for Hindus, now codified in independent India, represents this residue. This illustrates the privatization of ‘religion’ under secularism. The rhetoric that encouraged and accompanied this radical truncation of dharmaśāstra, now called ‘Hindu law’, depended upon the imposition of a non-native understanding of the separation between ‘law’ and ‘religion’, as well as on the idea that such a separation, initially introduced by the Gospel, should be mediated by an ostensibly secular colonial modernity.

If secularization meant separation, then we must acknowledge the deeply Christian roots of this process. Jakob De Roover argues similarly that secularism, conceived as founded on a positive and normative distinction between the religious and political domains, is indebted to earlier Christian theological paradigms. He contends further that, due to its parochial nature and cultural presuppositions, secularism as applied in India represents a European transplant that has failed to take root in its new environment. Drawing on the theories of his teacher S. N. Balagangadhara, who argues that ‘religion’ is a Christian concept with no empirical referent in traditional Indian society, De Roover reaches a parallel conclusion: namely, that ‘secularism’ is not a universal category and should not be deployed uncritically outside of the post-Christian European context.Footnote ⁴⁸ De Roover's argument is not entirely original. Others, such as T. N. Madan and Ashis Nandy, have argued previously for the Christian roots of secularism and the lack of fitness of this doctrine in the Indian context.Footnote ⁴⁹ De Roover's description of the colonial transformation of dharmaśāstra into ‘Hindu law’ through a process of codification also treads a well-worn path. More problematic still is his (undemonstrated) contention that secularism is to blame for contemporary fundamentalism and communalism in India.

De Roover's strongest argument is that the idea of secularism as the distinction between religion and politics goes back to Christian antecedents, such as the differences between the ‘Two Kingdoms’ of pope and emperor.Footnote ⁵⁰ While Madan, as well as Ze'ev Falk 40 years ago,Footnote ⁵¹ had already pointed to this precedent, De Roover develops this claim further by focusing on John Locke's secularization of such theological ideas.Footnote ⁵² If the separation between the Two Kingdoms can be traced back to medieval Christianity, or even to the New Testament idea of ‘rendering unto Caesar’,Footnote ⁵³ then separation cannot be ‘secular’ in the sense of non-religious. As De Roover argues, there exists a direct connection between the idea of Martin Luther and other reformers that religion under the Gospel is free and spiritual, and the later, ostensibly secular, idea of religious freedom or toleration. These ideas were based heavily on Christian supersessionism and on the claim that Judaism and Catholicism were ritualistic, legalistic, and persecuting religions.Footnote ⁵⁴

Others, including myself,Footnote ⁵⁵ have provided similar accounts of the Christian genealogy of religious freedom. Already before the end of the nineteenth century, the Scottish theologian James Stuart Candlish and the German legal historian Georg Jellinek identified the seventeenth-century New England preacher Roger Williams's argument for religious toleration as theological in inspiration.Footnote ⁵⁶ Jellinek's genealogical approach in turn influenced Max Weber's excavation of the Protestant ethic.Footnote ⁵⁷ Recent scholarship has contested but not, to my mind, displaced such genealogies.Footnote ⁵⁸ De Roover's account is another example.

While agreeing with De Roover on many points regarding the theological genealogy of the separationist idea of secularism, I find there are two points that require further clarification. First, the idea of the Two Kingdoms per se is not characteristic of secularism, but was rather a structural component of Christianity that was subsequently transformed and recoded in ostensibly non-religious terms. I believe that De Roover would agree on this point, although we may differ somewhat on the details of precisely how this happened. In any case, the point bears elaboration, because it highlights how separation can by no means be used to distinguish something called ‘secularism’ from whatever came before it. Second, and relatedly, secularism, properly understood, was only superficially characterized by a form of separation. The more fundamental tendency was the unification of all power and authority under the Leviathan of the state. In relation to this, the idea of the separation of church and state appears as a true survival from a Christian past, a vestigial limb, like a vermiform appendix, that no longer serves any organic function in the body politic.

The mere separation between religion and politics, in the sense of an independent institutionalization of these two categories and a social imaginary that reflects awareness of their existence, is in the first instance a characteristic, not of secular but of many pre-modern societies. Indeed, ancient and pre-colonial India had various forms of this distinction, such as the division between Kṣatriya and Brahman, laukika and dharmika, Mir and Pir.Footnote ⁵⁹ The distinction itself in the Christian context is a theological one, having been codified by Pope Gelasius I in 494 ce in his letter ‘There are Two’ (Duo sunt), where he claimed a ‘sacred authority’ (auctoritas sacrata) that was parallel and superior to the emperor's ‘royal power’ (regalis potestas).Footnote ⁶⁰ Gelasius also termed this the distinction between the royalty (regnum) and the priesthood (sacerdotium). This distinction was arguably grounded in Holy Scripture, with Jesus's injunction to ‘render unto Caesar’Footnote ⁶¹ and his disclaimer that ‘my kingdom is not of this world’,Footnote ⁶² which was embodied in the legal institution of the Roman Catholic Church. Following Gelasius, this duality of authority came to be known as the ‘Two Kingdoms’ or ‘Two Swords’. So much of this background has rooted itself in European minds and languages that we assume the naturalness of the distinction between Church and State, which are often capitalized in English to signal their fictive personhood or metaphysical substantiality. Such a separation can hardly apply in the same way to cultures where this institutional division has not occurred. This already highlights the erroneousness of the claim that the ‘separation of religion and politics’, without further qualification, is a distinctive feature of secular societies. This is one reason why I am sceptical of the attempt to define secularism in such terms, and in an earlier publication criticized ‘differentiation theories’ of the secular as applied to ancient India.Footnote ⁶³ The idea of such a separation achieved its greatest social salience in Europe during the Middle Ages, when it grounded the Roman Catholic Church's claim to an independent authority. Obviously, something more than separation is needed in order for secularism to obtain. Secularism represented a radical transformation in the traditional doctrine of separation within Latin Christendom. During and after the Reformation, a starker insistence on the division of labour between religion and politics contributed to what we commonly think of as freedom of religion. The roots of this development lay deep in Protestant theology.

As De Roover noted, John Locke followed reformers such as Luther in defining true Christian religion as a matter of inner belief or conscience rather than outer ritual practice. Locke's argument, in his Letter on Toleration (1689), that ‘there is no such thing under the Gospel as a Christian commonwealth’ depended on his definition of religion as an ‘inward persuasion’, a definition that was echoed by English Deists and other freethinkers, who wanted to liberate religion—or at least the part that consists of conscience, doctrine, or belief—from governmental control. The Deist Thomas Morgan echoed Locke when he argued in the 1730s that, while there could be (and still is in England) an ‘established Church’ as a merely political institution, the idea of an ‘established Religion’ was an oxymoron.Footnote ⁶⁴ This position was not peculiarly English; Immanuel Kant borrowed such Deist ideas when arguing that Judaism was a political system, rather than a religion, because it was concerned with external performances or rituals.Footnote ⁶⁵ A few years after Locke published his Letter on Toleration, the theologian Humphrey Prideaux condemned Islam, Judaism, and Roman Catholicism as ‘impostures’, by which he meant illicit combinations of religion with politics.Footnote ⁶⁶ Religions that used violent and coercive means to attain political power were the opposite of the true religion of the Gospel, which was represented ideally by English Protestantism. Prideaux was trying to defend orthodox Christianity against the Deists, but Morgan later extended Prideaux's label of ‘imposture’ to Moses and the Conquest of Canaan, further undermining biblical tradition. More obviously than Locke's, Prideaux's argument for toleration was theologically based, supersessionist, and contrastive, meaning that it established a hierarchy of true and false religions. He repeatedly used the word ‘secular’ to demarcate those political interests and techniques of governance that must be kept separate from true religion. Prideaux was hardly an obscure figure: his Life of Mahomet (1697) went through many editions, was translated into all major European languages, and continued to be cited (and plagiarized) for more than a century. Despite this, his role in disseminating new thinking about freedom of religion has received little attention from scholars of secularism.

This idea of a strict separation between religion and politics depended upon a peculiarly Protestant, or at least post-Reformation Christian, understanding of what ‘religion’ is. This is not to say that this understanding had exclusively theological motivations. There were important political and social reasons that conditioned the rise to dominance of this understanding, such as the desire to avoid bloodshed. As religion became apolitical, the state became religiously neutral, meaning that claims of religious truth were deemed no longer acceptable as grounds for dissenting from an existing order. The state should no longer be a site for salvation: for messianic hopes, perhaps, but also for apocalyptic or total war. During the English Civil War, radical sectarians claimed new revelations as the basis for dissenting from the existing social order. Defending that order against attack, Thomas Hobbes embraced the orthodox Protestant position that prophecies had ceased.Footnote ⁶⁷ Just after the war, in 1665, the theologian John Spencer forcefully articulated the view that prophecies, together with miracles and oracles, had ended in Apostolic times, if not already with Christ's passion. Declaring our religion now to be ‘sedate, cool, and silent’, Spencer anticipated what Max Weber later called ‘disenchantment’. This was a political as well as a religious phenomenon, just as what it opposed, namely the volatile combination of religion with politics labelled in English ‘enthusiasm’ and in German Schwärmerei.Footnote ⁶⁸

However, the rise of a specifically modern understanding of the separation of religion from politics was really secondary to the primary thrust of secularization, which unified all power under the newly monolithic nation-state. The division of labour between pope and emperor was characteristic of the Middle Ages, not of what came after. Of course, there is no space here to recount in any detail the long history of the struggle between the papacy and the Holy Roman Emperor, or the kings of France, and so on. Earlier historians, from Otto von Gierke and John Neville Figgis to Ernst Kantorowicz, have shown how this struggle culminated in absolutist claims, first of one and then the other side, until finally the state emerged victorious.Footnote ⁶⁹ It would not be appropriate to describe this as a victory of secular over religious authority, because both sides claimed to consolidate these two powers under either the church or the state. There is a direct line from Boniface VIII's Unam sanctam (1302), which already presents such claims; to Luther's Address to the German Nobles (1520), which dissolved the wall between clergy and laity so as to grant equal authority to all as members of one, universal church;Footnote ⁷⁰ to Henry VIII's Act of Supremacy (1534), through which the English king asserted his authority over the English Church. The Thirty Years’ War ended with the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) which, like the earlier Peace of Augsburg (1555), articulated the rule of cuius regio, eius religio: ‘Whoever rules the realm gets to decide the reigning religion’. Gradually allowances were made for the toleration of religious minorities, but these were adopted as exceptions to the rule of a state church.

In the immediate aftermath of both Westphalia and the beheading of Charles I in 1649, which highlighted the dangers of religious dissent as fomenting the English Civil War, Hobbes published his Leviathan (1651), which advocated, from its frontispiece onwards, for the unification of both civil and ecclesiastical powers under the sovereign. Hobbes's universalism was a direct corollary of the insistence that sovereignty must be unitary. In medieval Europe, the idea that sovereignty is singular and total was expressed by the analogy of divine right, or the notion that the king (or queen) was God's agent on earth. Monarchy and monotheism were logical corollaries in this political theology. Rather than a separation of powers, Hobbes insisted on the unitary nature of sovereignty, as a means of avoiding competition among political and legal regimes. Where Gelasius had claimed ‘Duo sunt’, Hobbes insisted, ‘Unum est’: ‘There can be only One’. This is the import of the famous frontispiece of Leviathan, where the temporal powers on the left and their spiritual analogues on the right are shown as indissolubly united in the singular person of the earthly sovereign, who holds both the sceptre of religion and the sword of state.

Hobbes insisted that there must be an establishment of religion in order to avoid conflict. His position is often identified with Erastianism, a doctrine that affirms that the state should control the church. Even accomplished scholars often miss his more radical claim, namely that religion is merely politics under another name. Charles Taylor, for example, describes Hobbes's doctrine in terms of the privatization of religion:

Taylor's reading of Hobbes is not mistaken, but incomplete. Hobbes was more radical than this. He argued in clear terms that Christianity itself is a form of politics. Following William Tyndale's translation of the Greek word ekklesia as ‘congregation’, Hobbes defined a ‘church’ as ‘a company of men professing Christian religion, united in the person of one sovereign … [and] the same thing with a civil commonwealth consisting of Christian men … Temporal and spiritual government are but two words brought into the world to make men see double and mistake their lawful sovereign.’Footnote ⁷² Rather than simply affirming that religion should be governed by the state, Hobbes was arguing that, properly understood, a church or other ‘religious’ community is actually a political body. According to the logic of sovereignty, all members of the commonwealth must be united into a single body politic—that of the Leviathan—and not fragmented into different polities that may compete for power.

Hobbes systematically reduced religious categories to political ones. The English Church was a ‘ghostly authority’ that competed with that of the sovereign;Footnote ⁷³ the papacy, the ‘ghost of the deceased Roman empire’ sitting on the ruins of that empire and still speaking its dead language;Footnote ⁷⁴ and priests were ‘fairies’ or agents of the ‘Kingdom of Darkness’.Footnote ⁷⁵ Not content to attack the Catholic Church, Hobbes drew upon an existing exegetical tradition according to which the biblical Leviathan was the Egyptian pharaoh.Footnote ⁷⁶ The blasphemous implication of Hobbes's demand that we submit to Leviathan/pharaoh was that the Exodus that inaugurated Mosaic monotheism was an illegitimate political revolution. Not content to refute more than a thousand years of Gelasius's Two Kingdoms idea, Hobbes wanted to restore the original unity of religion with politics, before the latter was disrupted by the Hebrews in a slave revolt.

In his description of ‘civil religion’, Jean-Jacques Rousseau largely adopted Hobbes's account, adding that earlier all religions were tribal and political affairs, attributing the separation of religion from politics to the Gospel and Jesus rather than Moses (who governed a theocracy, after all), and arguing that something like religion is a necessary component of a healthy state.Footnote ⁷⁷ Rousseau advocated reuniting the ‘two heads of the eagle’, meaning religion and politics. The French Revolution that came after was radically anticlerical, to the extent of instituting a new religion modelled on pagan lines, right down to changing the calendar. The experience of rupture with the Christian past and the search for something like a civil religion has deeply marked French thought ever since, including that of Émile Durkheim, who viewed the phenomenon of religion as coextensive with that of the church, in the form that this now takes, namely that of the state.Footnote ⁷⁸ This partly explains the more thoroughgoing exclusion of other religions from the political sphere that characterizes French laïcité.

Hobbes's universalism is as much a part of secular modernity as is the idea of separation or religious toleration. The contradiction between these two positions—unity of government and diversity of religions—was largely solved by making religion apolitical. This was the thrust of Locke's argument for separation, an argument that, while made in philosophical terms, also had deep underpinnings in Christian theology. Indeed, Locke's definition, in his first Letter on Toleration (1689), of ‘commonwealth’ and ‘church’ as distinct entities with clearly separate functions represented a response to Hobbes's argument that there could be no logical and principled distinction between these two entities. Locke's rear-guard defence of the older Christian division of labour was a rhetorical success, although it required a further privatization of religion and marginalization of its institutional authority. Despite the greater logical coherence of Hobbes's argument, few modern polities have attempted to take the final step in the direction that he pointed out, and these have been mainly totalitarian states. Communist governments have on occasion tried to eradicate religion, or failing that, to exert complete control. Witness current developments in China, among which is the appointment of Christian ministers and a state-supervised translation of the Bible. Hobbes presumably would have approved, since he explicitly granted the sovereign control over the interpretation of scripture.Footnote ⁷⁹ Indeed, to put it within the comparative framework of this special issue, Hobbes's vision of all forms of religions being subordinate to the sacred body of a sovereign divinely ordained to judge among them was congruent with that of Akbar and his Mongol ancestor Chinggis Khan.

From this history we have inherited, alongside the notion of separation, the idea that secularism requires a universal legal system that applies, by default, to all citizens, regardless of their confession (or lack thereof). This is a function of the hegemonic nature of the modern state and of the cultural dominance of the idea that religion must remain apolitical and extra-legal. Any derogation from this principle is open to suspicion and must be tightly circumscribed. Of course, we have examples of such derogations: the German state collects tax on behalf of the established churches, while the Indian state enforces the personal laws of Hindus, Muslims, and other confessions, despite the controversies over such exceptions.

Charles Taylor captured this aspect of secularism when he defined it as involving ‘the shift from hierarchical, mediated-access societies to horizontal, direct-access societies’ in which our ‘fundamental way of belonging to the state is not dependent on or mediated by … other belongings’ or ‘through intermediary organizations’, but is instead a ‘direct relationship’.Footnote ⁸⁰ In the second half of the nineteenth century, Otto von Gierke already described this aspect of secular modernity, in which the sovereign individual stands alone before the sovereign and absolute state.Footnote ⁸¹ Yet to say this is to admit that the state now functions as if the church did not exist. This was Hobbes's final conclusion, and it was conditioned by his commitment to Nominalism, which itself had dissolved all such forms of mediation, viewed as unacceptable limitations on the sovereignty of God or that of his agent on earth.

Rather than as a separation between politics and religion, or as the religious neutrality of the state, secularism would be better understood as a regime that delimits the possibility of pluralism, meaning the opportunity for friction among competing authorities. Whereas something like the separation between religion and politics is scarcely unique to the contemporary world, it is the increasingly monolithic nature of the modern nation-state that distinguishes secularism from whatever preceded it. This is why, in my view, both Bhargava and De Roover have misdiagnosed the central tendency of secularism, which is not the separation but rather the unification of religion with politics, that Hobbes and Rousseau depicted as a return to the original idea of politics as a totality that encompasses what we call religion.

Aśoka as secularist, redux

Following this historical sketch of secularization in Europe, I want to turn back to Aśoka now. Does this modified understanding of what secularism entailed help us at all to understand the Mauryan emperor's Dhamma? His inscriptions clearly identify Aśoka as personally a devout Buddhist,Footnote ⁸² having converted supposedly after, and as a result of, witnessing the violence associated with his conquest of Kalinga.Footnote ⁸³ He also enforced the excommunication of schismatics from the Sangha or individual sanghas.Footnote ⁸⁴ According to legend, Aśoka presided over the Third Buddhist Council at Pataliputra and the canonization of Buddhist teachings and expulsion of schismatics that occurred there. Aśoka was therefore what we would call an ‘establishmentarian’, a believer in the need for unity within the Buddhist tradition and, at least to some degree, between that tradition and the state.Footnote ⁸⁵ Further proof for this is that he promoted or enforced certain precepts aligned with Buddhist positions in interreligious or doctrinal disputes. For example, he prohibited the sacrifice of animalsFootnote ⁸⁶ and expressed disdain for rituals in general,Footnote ⁸⁷ while generally promoting what Bhargava, following Gananath Obeyesekere, has aptly termed an ‘ethicization’ of religion.Footnote ⁸⁸ An example is Pillar Edict 2: ‘Dhamma is good, but what constitutes Dhamma? (It includes) little evil, much good, kindness, generosity, truthfulness and purity.’ This expresses a sentiment familiar also from the Sigalovada Sutta of the Pali Canon, where the Buddha reinterprets the Vedic sacrifice in terms of duties to other people within the community.Footnote ⁸⁹ In other words, Aśoka followed the Buddhist rejection of sacrifice and its associated violence. This meant taking a stand in an interreligious dispute.

In enforcing and promoting the Dhamma, Aśoka also sent ambassadors (Dhamma Mahamatras Footnote ⁹⁰) both throughout and beyond his realm, contributing to the stability of his empire and the longer-term expansion of Buddhism as a transnational religion. Rock Edict 5 is relevant in this regard:

The Dhamma emissaries worked among different ‘religions’ (pāṣaṇḍa), as well as among different nations or peoples, such as Greeks, both within and beyond, or at the margins of, the Mauryan empire.Footnote ⁹¹ Whereas the pāṣaṇḍas were variable, tribal, or local, Dhamma was understood to be universal.Footnote ⁹² Bhargava argues further that ‘Dhamma is akin to empirically identifiable political morality’, while it also ‘constitutes the all-important common ground, the essentials, of all pāṣaṇḍas’.Footnote ⁹³ Dhamma represented a universal ethic of righteousness, which had to be propagated among all of the various parts of Aśoka's kingdom, and even abroad. Aśoka's Dhamma represented, as Bhargava has said, ‘a public or political morality’,Footnote ⁹⁴ one that was regarded as necessary to preserve the integrity of the empire. Aśoka's Dhamma-emissaries go ‘everywhere … to determine who is devoted to Dhamma’. We need to recall that the edicts were propaganda and designed to put the best possible ‘spin’ on the reality of Aśoka's rule, a rule that Buddhist legend says was violent and cruel. Scholars have noted a contrast and convergence between the edicts and the Realpolitik or Machiavellian philosophy expounded in Kauṭilya's Arthaśāstra, a text purportedly authored during the Mauryan dynasty but of undetermined age and discovered only in the last century.Footnote ⁹⁵ This text describes how the king maintains control through a state security apparatus that includes covert agents who test the probity and loyalty of officials and subjects, and who may appear in the guise of monks, mendicants, and members of pāṣaṇḍas.Footnote ⁹⁶ Nehru stated that ‘in some ways this Mauryan state reminds one of modern dictatorships’.Footnote ⁹⁷ This parallel suggests that we must, of course, reflect critically upon Aśoka's presentation of the benevolence of his kingdom and of his Dhamma.

Aśoka's Dhamma was not identical with, but was inspired by, the Buddhist Dhamma. It represented something like an ecumenical version of the latter, converted into the basis of a civil ethos for a plural society. We can accept many of the parallels that have been claimed to exist between Aśoka and contemporary Indian secularism. However, Aśoka appears much closer to Hobbes's monist model of secularism than he does to the separationist model. Although sectarian opinions are tolerated, they are subordinated to the universal ethic of Dhamma, which, as a result of its centrality to the civil constitution, transcends the category of mere ‘religion’. Aśoka's Dhamma is both religion and politics at the same time, a universal ethic for a diverse empire, or what Patrick Olivelle called a ‘civil religion’.

Bhargava identified Aśoka as one of the ‘roots’ of Indian pluralism, if not of secularism. He further contended that ‘Contemporary polities, including India, can draw lessons from … [such] normative models of pluralism.’Footnote ⁹⁸ He carefully distinguished the Aśokan model from ‘secularism’ in the narrower, modern sense, while contending that ‘it is not so absurd to claim that forms of secularity existed in ancient and early modern India’.Footnote ⁹⁹ I would like to add my qualified agreement: Aśoka anticipated the dilemmas of contemporary secularism and attempted to resolve those dilemmas precisely by embracing not a separationist, but a universalist or Hobbesian model of secularism, even to the extent of instituting something like a (possibly benevolent) police state, which enforced adherence to Dhamma.

Aśoka's Dhamma emissaries fulfil the role of the plague doctors who have been identified in the frontispiece of Hobbes's Leviathan, roaming the streets of the city.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ As the translator of Thucydides, Hobbes was well aware of the linkage between plagues and insurrections, such as the plague that struck Athens during the first year of the Peloponnesian War:Footnote ¹⁰¹ both represent states of emergency or breakdowns in civil order. Like Hobbes's plague doctors, Aśoka's Dhamma mahamatras are specialists who spy out diseases in the body politic, and attempt to cure these before the infection can become widespread and potentially fatal. Religion is in the service of the state, which is why Aśoka's spies (if he shared Kauṭilya's methods) may have been disguised as monks and nuns; unless of course they were actually monks and nuns, members of the sangha grateful for the emperor's patronage and eager to reciprocate.Footnote ¹⁰²

Even the First Rock Edict may be read against the grain to reveal a different message:

Aśoka's embrace of ahiṃsā and prohibition of sacrifices were presumably heartfelt. However, they also had the value of maintaining public order. In much of the ancient world, sacrifices were public occasions, with political dimensions.Footnote ¹⁰³ Aśoka's ban on sacrifices and many assemblies or festivals (samājas) would have minimized such potentially volatile gatherings.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ We should recall that the Exodus revolt against the Egyptian pharaoh began with the demand that the Hebrews be granted a holiday for the purpose of offering a sacrifice (Exod 3:18). In the context of ancient Near Eastern culture, this was already a sign of rebellion, because in those days sacrifice was the seal of a covenant of service to a king, in this case to a god-king other than the pharaoh.

The convergence between political and religious authority reinforces the parallel that has been drawn between Aśoka and Constantine, as promoters of Buddhism and Christianity respectively, despite other differences between them.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Like Constantine, who presided over the Council at Nicaea in 325 ce, Aśoka is said to have presided over the Third Buddhist Council at his capital of Pataliputra. Again, there is an obvious parallel to the inter-confessional religious debates Akbar organized and presided over in the ‘Ibadat Khana. The right of secular rulers to convene a Church council was, by the way, one of the points defended by Luther during the Protestant Reformation.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The Church's claim of an exclusive prerogative in this regard was another of the ‘walls’ that Luther tore down en route to secularism. Again, this was hardly separation—quite the opposite.

Both Buddhism and Christianity emerged out of the so-called ‘Axial Age’, which Bhargava has noted as the context for Aśoka's Dhamma as a universal ethic.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ A number of scholars have identified this historical moment as the inauguration of a separation of religion from politics.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ If we consider Buddhism and Christianity only as revolutionary religious movements, then there is some cogence to this description. However, this was also the moment of the appearance of large imperial formations, which transcended the boundaries of traditional tribes and small kingdoms and city-states.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Such imperial formations, as in the case of Aśoka and Constantine, may require the adoption of a universalizing religion as a ‘glue’ to counterbalance the centrifugal force that would otherwise disperse such larger bodies politic. The irony, then, is that such ‘religious’ protest movements seem to have been co-opted swiftly by expanding empires to reinforce political power. From this perspective, the Axial Age led to the unification of politics and religion, as well as of peoples, rather than to their separation. There is an analogy, albeit imperfect, with what happened with the rise of the modern nation-state, which witnessed a return to the unity of politics and religion in the form of Hobbes's Leviathan.

We know very little of Buddhism before Aśoka, whose edicts represent the oldest preserved writings on the subcontinent. The earliest complete biography of the Buddha, Aśvaghoṣa's Buddhacarita (Acts of the Buddha), was composed in Sanskrit several centuries after Aśoka's empire fell, and around a half a millennium after the Buddha presumably lived. The gap between legend and history is at least as great as that which exists in the case of Jesus. The Buddhacarita tells the story of how the Buddha was born in the palace of his father, King Śuddhodana. It was predicted that he would grow up to be either the Buddha or a Cakravartin, a great wheel-turning emperor. Like Jesus, the Buddha was supposed to be a king of sorts. Given the sequence of historical events, it is quite possible that this image of the Buddha was derived from the memory of the first Buddhist emperor, Aśoka, who turned the Wheel of Dhamma for the subcontinent, and beyond.Footnote ¹¹⁰ What does this convergence between the two figures of king and renunciant tell us about the inseparability of religious authority and political power? And what does this inseparability say about secularism itself?