Harsa

Indian raja (r. 606-c. 647)

• Born: c. 590
• Birthplace: Probably Thānesar, India
• Died: c. 647
• Place of death: Possibly Kanauj, India

One of the last great rulers of the classical age of Hindu India, Harṣa defended Buddhism in its homeland, established relations with the Chinese empire, and distinguished himself in classical Sanskrit theater.

Early Life

Much of the information recorded about the youth of Harṣa (HUHR-shuh) comes from the account of Bāa , a contemporary Sanskrit poet. Harṣa was the second son of Prabhākaravardhana, the raja of Thānesar (probably a small, independent state in the Punjab). The death of his father ultimately led Harṣa, however reluctantly, to rule for more than forty years over a great north Indian empire. Yet the path to the throne was neither easy nor obvious.

After their mother, Yasomati, committed suttee self-sacrifice on her husband’s funeral pyre both Harṣa and his elder brother, Rājyavardhana, declined the succession. This situation persisted until their sister, Rājyasrī, who had married Grahavarman, the Maukhari king of Kanauj, was imprisoned after the death of her husband by Devagupta, king of Malwa (Malava; in west-central India). Rājyavardhana, abandoning his ascetic life, defeated Devagupta; unfortunately, the young king was assassinated by Devagupta’s ally, SŃaṣāka, king of Gauḍa (modern Bengal). On learning of her brother’s death, Rājyasrī who had been freed by a sympathetic noble wandered into the Vindhya Mountains, while Rājyavardhana’s army fell into disarray. Harṣa, who had been left in charge of the government by his brother, rallied the royal forces; formed an alliance with another of SŃaṣāka’s enemies, Bhaskaravarman, king of Kāmarūpa; and found his sister, who was about to mount a funeral pyre in the mountains.

Vowing vengeance against SŃaṣāka, his brother’s murderer, the sixteen-year-old Harṣa began a war of universal conquest. Although his objective would not be achieved, he nevertheless managed to transform a desperate situation. According to tradition, his initial hesitance about ascending the throne was overcome by encouragement from the statue of Avalokiteṣvara Bodhisattva (the merciful, earthly manifestation of the eternal Buddha). Although apocryphal, this story of the statue certainly indicates the spiritual dimension of Harṣa’s personality.

Life’s Work

The rich details provided by Bāa in Sri Harṣcarita (seventh century; The Harshacharita of Banabhatta, 1892) break off abruptly with Harṣa’s reunion with his sister. Aside from royal seals and inscriptions, the account of a contemporary Buddhist pilgrim, Xuanzang (Hsüan-tsang; c. 602-664), is the only record of the remainder of Harṣa’s lengthy reign. Unfortunately, Xuangzang met the king only around 643 and left India in 644, three years before Harṣa’s death. Therefore, much about Harṣa’s reign remains unknown.

Harṣa, who was always on the move, amassed a huge standing army; his forces easily exceeded those of Chandragupta Maurya in the fourth century b.c.e., even if figures of 60,000 elephants, 100,000 cavalry, and perhaps 1 million infantry are discounted as hyperbole. Although he apparently campaigned vigorously even in the early years of his reign, by about 620, he was deeply involved in warfare, battling the forces of King Pulakeśin II of the Cālukya Dynasty of the northern Deccan and, after 636, annexing much of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa. These facts somewhat modify contemporary claims of thirty years of peace under his rule.

Historical opinion is divided as to the extent of his conquests and the range of his empire. He suffered defeat at the hands of the Cālukya, which may or may not have established the sacred Narmada River as his southern boundary. He never apparently defeated his avowed enemy SŃaṣāka (who cut down the Bodhi tree at Bodh Gayā), only making his eastern acquisitions sometime after the latter’s death in about 637. Apparently, Harṣa also had little success against the states of western India. Lāa, Malwa, and Gurjara were buffer states protected by Pulakeś;in II, and powerful Sindh fought him off, although Dharasena IV of Valabhī became his son-in-law.

Harṣa’s political power, based in Kanauj (now a minor village with few traces left of his era), embraced the populous, traditional heartland of the Gangetic plain. His prestige and influence extended throughout northern India but was counterbalanced by the Cālukya of the Deccan plateau region. His empire was not a centralized one under his direct control as has sometimes been asserted.

The state was highly organized, yet few details about it are known. In a traditional society based on bureaucratic villages, tours of inspection through the provinces and districts were the means of control. Taxes were light, and 50 percent of the budget went to religion and the arts. (At quinquennial assemblies, the treasury surpluses of the past five years were distributed to religious sects and the solitary poor.) An infrastructure to protect travelers, the poor, and the sick including rest houses, stupas, and monasteries was in place. The judicial system (inherited from the Gupta, a north Indian dynasty that ruled from the early fourth to the mid-sixth century) was based on social morality and filial duty; its deterrents included imprisonments, mutilations, banishments, and fines. The economy, based on textiles and metals, was prosperous, as was shown by the fact that the assembly’s distributed wealth was always replenished in the following ten days.

Although a Hindu (probably a Shaivite), Harṣa seems to have been committed early to Buddhism , most likely its Māhayāna form, although it was not uncommon for rulers to follow a tolerant and eclectic religious policy. His brother Rājyavardhana had been a Buddhist and his sister Rājyasrī became a Buddhist nun. In 643, Harṣa demanded the presence of the illustrious Chinese Buddhist Xuanzang (Hsüan-tsang; c. 602-664), who had studied at Nalanda University in his realm, bringing him from the court of his ally, Bhaskaravarman of Kāmarūpa, by threat of force.

In the last years of his reign, Harṣa sought to model himself after Aś;oka the Great as the chief patron of his religion at a time when Buddhism was losing its position to Hinduism . At the sixth quinquennial assembly at Prayaqa in 643, he favored Buddhism in his distribution of the wealth. He also convoked a grand religious assembly at Kanauj attended by twenty kings marked by twenty-one days of festival centered on a 100-foot (30-meter) tower holding a life-size statue of the Buddha. During this festival, Harṣa arranged a theological disputation, with Xuanzang as the Buddhist champion. The tensions arising from this advocacy led to two frustrated murder conspiracies: Hīnayānist Buddhists conspired against Xuanzang, and on the last day of the festival, they used a diversionary fire to attack Harṣa with a knife.

Harṣa opened diplomatic relations with the Chinese empire in 641. This action led to a series of Chinese embassies in 641, 643, and, stimulated by Xuanzang’s return to China, in 647, under Wang Huienze. The last embassy arrived after Harṣa’s death and apparently was attacked by Harṣa’s usurping minister, Arjuna. Wang’s embassy, with Nepalese, Tibetan, and Kāmarūpa help, captured Arjuna and brought him to China. Wang returned to India in 657 and 664, and the Chinese connection lasted until 787. Xuanzang, who had received gold and an elephant from Harṣa, returned to China with 520 cases of Indian religious documents and founded the Buddhist Consciousness Only School, which later strongly influenced Japanese Buddhism.

In addition to these achievements, Harṣa was a leading Sanskrit playwright in the mold of Kālidāsa, writing {I}Ratnāvāli{/I} (seventh century; Retnavali: Or, The Necklace, 1827) and Priyadarś;ikā (seventh century; English translation, 1923), which contains the new device of a play-within-a-play. His last work, the {I}Nágánanda{/I} (seventh century; Nágánanda: Or, The Joy of the Snake-World, 1872), contains Buddhist themes of the bodhisattva and self-sacrifice in a Hindu framework (perhaps Harṣa played Garuda, the redeemed mythical bird). Although his authorship of the plays has been disputed, Harṣa clearly was a patron of learning and the arts in a period marked by the breakdown of the classical Gupta achievement.

Significance

Though the uniqueness of Harṣa’s role in Indian history has been seriously challenged, including the true extent of his empire, his military record, and his depiction as the last great Buddhist-Hindu ruler before Islam, the fact remains that Harṣa constructed a dominant, celebrated political entity out of a petty state amid the disintegration of the Gupta world, holding it together for more than forty years, although it fragmented on his death. Indeed, one of the chronological eras of Indian history is fixed on his reign. Harṣa’s advocacy of Buddhism in a Hindu frame was a factor in encouraging Xuanzang to carry its message to the Far East, even as that religion was about to lose force in its homeland. Harṣa was essentially a philosopher-king inspired by dharma in his character and in his rule of an enlightened welfare state. He was a lion of activity, who ignored food and sleep and found the day too short. The power of his personality is shown by the grim humor of his reply to Bhaskaravarman, who had offered to send his head in place of Xuanzang to Harṣa’s court, “Send head per bearer,” and by his defense of Xuanzang’s life at Kanauj, when he threatened to cut out the tongues of the pilgrim’s enemies.

Bibliography

Bāa. The Harsa-carita. Translated by E. B. Cowell and F. W. Thomas. London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1897. Bāa, a Brahman and Harṣa’s court poet, covers Harṣa’s life until he gained the throne in 612. Written in a masterly, highly ornate style, his work is the first Sanskrit biography.

Devahuti, Deva. Harsha: A Political Study. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. An updated assessment, written from the Indian perspective, of Harṣa’s role in Indian history. Includes genealogical tables and twelve plates.

Devahuti, Deva. The Unknown Hsüan-tsang. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. A collection of translations of Xuanzang’s translations into Chinese, with a biographical account of the monk by an Indian scholar.

Mookerji, R. K. Harsha. Oxford, England: H. Milford, 1926. Part of the Rulers of India series, Mookerji’s seminal study was one of the first to promote Harṣa’s importance in classical India. This biography gathers together all the then-known information about this myth-shrouded figure. Includes indexes and notes.

Panikkar, K. M. Sri Harsha of Kanauj: A Monograph on the History of India in the First Half of the Seventh Century A.D. Bombay: D. B. Taraporevaja Sons, 1922. One of the pioneer studies in Indian history, this work builds up Harṣa as a king of enormous influence and power, setting him against the background of his era. Includes indexes and notes.

Thapar, Romila. Early India: From the Origins to A.D. 1300. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. A general overview of the early history of India, covering its states and cities.

Wriggins, Sally Hovey. Xuanzang: A Buddhist Pilgrim on the Silk Road. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996. A readable and accessible biography of Xuanzang.

Xuanzang. Si-yu-ki: Buddhist Records of the Western World. Translated by Samuel Beal. 2 vols. 1884. Reprint. London: Routledge, 2000. The Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang covers Harṣa’s reign historically, although with a pronounced religious bias. This panegyric was written after Xuanzang’s return to China in 645.