The Days the King Ashoka Named: Tisya, Punarvasu, and the Lunar Days of Rock Edict IX - Morality, the Moon's Calendar, and the Sanchi Stupa as oldest India's Astronomical Monument
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Rock Edict IX is the only Aśokan edict that legislates explicitly about festival days: it names the Tisya day, the Punarvasu day, the eighth, fourteenth and fifteenth days of the fortnight, the three seasonal Cāturmāsyas, the Tisya full moon, and the general categories of festivals, auspicious ceremonies and fasting days — and then declares them all "of doubtful value," replacing them with the "ceremony of Dhamma." This paper reconstructs the astronomy behind each named day (the 27-mansion nakshatra system, the tithi cycle, the new- and full-moon fasts), shows how each day carried a specific moral-ritual function in Vedic and Buddhist practice, and argues that Aśoka's edict performs a decisive Buddhist revaluation: the moon's cycle is retained as the clock of morality, while stellar-time is stripped of intrinsic auspiciousness. The paper then turns to the Sanchi Stupa — founded by the same emperor who issued Rock Edict IX — and compares it as the earliest surviving Buddhist monument whose layout demonstrably encodes astronomical alignments (the summer-solstice and zenith-passage orientation). It evaluates, honestly, the popular claim that ISRO or NASA research identified Sanchi as India's oldest astronomical observatory and draws "new dimensions" from the pan-Buddhist tradition of aligning temples to full-moon nakshatras, documented from Mauryan-era Sanchi to the temples of medieval Thailand.
Author: Adv. Rajiv Shinde
Language: English
Subfield: Archeology (arts and humanities)
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7223110708