Ashoka Maurya ruled most of the Indian subcontinent from roughly 268 to 232 BCE. He is the earliest figure in Buddhist history whose existence, dates, and words are independently attested, and the earliest Indian ruler of any kind about whom this is true. His inscriptions — carved on polished sandstone pillars and on rock faces from Afghanistan to Karnataka — are the first decipherable writing from India after the still-unread Indus script.

He is also the subject of a large body of Buddhist legend that does not match the inscriptions very well. Keeping the two apart is the main work of reading him.

The edicts #

Ashoka’s inscriptions fall into several groups: fourteen Major Rock Edicts, a set of Minor Rock Edicts, seven Pillar Edicts, and various separate inscriptions including the Lumbini and Nigali Sagar pillars and the so-called schism edicts. They are written mostly in Prakrit in the Brahmi script, with Kharoshthi versions in the north-west and, at Kandahar, a bilingual Greek and Aramaic version.

The chronology of Ashoka’s reign can be fixed unusually well because the Thirteenth Major Rock Edict names five Hellenistic kings — Antiochus II of Syria, Ptolemy II of Egypt, Antigonus of Macedon, Magas of Cyrene, and Alexander of Epirus — to whom he claims to have sent emissaries. Their overlapping reigns pin the edict to a narrow window in the 250s BCE.

The inscriptions were unreadable for most of recorded history. James Prinsep deciphered Brahmi in 1837, and the identification of the “Devanampiya Piyadasi” (“Beloved of the Gods, He Who Looks On With Kindness”) of the inscriptions with the Ashoka of Buddhist legend followed, confirmed decisively when the Maski Minor Rock Edict was found in 1915 using the name Ashoka directly.

Kalinga #

The Thirteenth Major Rock Edict contains the famous passage. Eight years after his consecration, Ashoka conquered Kalinga, on the east coast. He gives figures: 150,000 deported, 100,000 killed, and many times that number dead afterwards.

Then, in his own voice: having conquered Kalinga, “Beloved of the Gods” felt remorse, because conquering an unconquered country involves slaughter, death, and deportation, and this he found deeply painful and grievous. He goes on to say that even those who escaped suffer through the misfortune of friends and relatives, that he considers the killing of even a hundredth or a thousandth part of that number grievous now, and that he considers the only true conquest to be conquest by dhamma.

This is a remarkable document — a ruler’s inscribed confession of remorse for his own most successful campaign, publicly displayed across his empire. It has, reasonably, made a deep impression for two centuries.

Some qualifications are worth making. The edict is a piece of state communication, not a diary, and the remorse is doing political work. Notably, the Kalinga edict is omitted from the versions carved in Kalinga itself. And Ashoka did not dismantle the army, abolish the death penalty (Pillar Edict IV mentions a three-day stay of execution, not abolition), or return the conquered territory.

What the edicts actually say about Buddhism #

Here the gap between the inscriptions and the legend opens up.

The great majority of the edicts promote dhamma, which Ashoka defines in strikingly non-technical terms: little evil, much good, kindness, generosity, truthfulness, purity, gentleness, obedience to parents and elders, proper treatment of friends, acquaintances, relatives, brahmins and ascetics, restraint towards living beings, and moderation in spending. There is nothing in this list that a Jain or a brahmin would reject.

Absent from the dhamma edicts are the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, nirvana, non-self, dependent origination, and meditation. Karma and rebirth appear, but in the general Indian sense of merit leading to heaven.

Ashoka also enjoins religious tolerance in unusually explicit terms. Rock Edict XII says that one should not honour one’s own sect while disparaging others, that doing so harms one’s own sect, and that concord is best — “let all listen, and be willing to listen, to the doctrines professed by others.”

That said, a smaller group of inscriptions is unambiguously Buddhist and personal:

  • The Minor Rock Edict I states that he has been a lay follower (upasaka) for over two and a half years, and that for a year or more he has drawn close to the sangha and exerted himself.
  • The Bhabra (Calcutta-Bairat) Edict is addressed to the sangha directly, declares his reverence for the Buddha, Dhamma, and Sangha, and recommends seven specific Buddhist texts for study by monks, nuns, and laypeople. It is the earliest external reference to Buddhist scripture.
  • The Lumbini pillar records his visit to the Buddha’s birthplace and his tax reduction for the village.
  • The Nigali Sagar pillar records his enlargement of a stupa of the previous buddha Konagamana, showing that the doctrine of past buddhas was already established.
  • The schism edicts, at Sanchi, Sarnath, and Kosambi, threaten monks or nuns who divide the sangha with being put into white clothes and expelled.

The picture that emerges is of a genuine Buddhist layman who nonetheless governed a religiously plural empire and whose public dhamma was an ethical programme designed to be acceptable to all of it. Scholars have argued this in both directions — Romila Thapar emphasising dhamma as a unifying civic ethic, others emphasising the personal Buddhist commitment — and the evidence supports a combination.

What the legends added #

The Buddhist legendary tradition, principally the Sanskrit Ashokavadana and the Pali chronicles of Sri Lanka, tells a different and more dramatic story.

The Ashokavadana gives him a brutal early career — “Ashoka the Fierce,” who murdered ninety-nine half-brothers and maintained an elaborate torture chamber disguised as a beautiful palace — before a conversion so complete that he becomes the model Buddhist king. It has him collect the relics from the original eight stupas and redistribute them into 84,000 stupas in a single day.

The Pali chronicles, the Dipavamsa and Mahavamsa, add the Third Council under Moggaliputta Tissa, the expulsion of sixty thousand heretics, and the mission of Ashoka’s son Mahinda to Sri Lanka — along with his daughter Sanghamitta, who brings a cutting of the Bodhi tree and establishes the order of nuns on the island.

None of this is in the inscriptions. The Third Council is not mentioned; Moggaliputta Tissa is not mentioned; Mahinda is not mentioned; the 84,000 stupas are not mentioned. Rock Edict XIII does describe sending dhamma emissaries to the Hellenistic kingdoms, which is the inscriptional kernel closest to the missionary legend.

The legends are best read as what they are: the tradition’s construction of the ideal Buddhist monarch, produced by communities with an interest in a royal charter for their own lineage. The Sri Lankan version legitimates Sri Lankan Buddhism; the north Indian version legitimates a different set of sites and relics.

The pillars #

The pillars are extraordinary objects in their own right — monolithic shafts of Chunar sandstone, up to twelve or thirteen metres and fifty tonnes, quarried near Varanasi, transported hundreds of kilometres, and polished to a mirror finish by a technique that was not reproduced afterwards.

The capitals carry animals: lions, a bull, an elephant. The four-lion capital from Sarnath, standing over a drum carved with four wheels and four animals, was adopted as the State Emblem of India in 1950, and the wheel from it is the chakra at the centre of the Indian flag. It is a curious afterlife for a Buddhist monument at the site of the first sermon: the emblem of a modern secular republic.

Why it mattered #

Ashoka’s reign changed Buddhism structurally in at least four ways.

Scale. Royal patronage on an imperial scale turned a regional movement into a pan-subcontinental institution with endowed monasteries and secure material support.

Geography. Whether or not the missions happened as the chronicles describe, Buddhism’s establishment in Sri Lanka in roughly this period is well attested, and Sri Lanka became the base from which the Theravada tradition survived and later spread through Southeast Asia.

The model of Buddhist kingship. Ashoka gave later rulers a template — the dhammaraja, the king who rules by righteousness and supports the sangha — invoked by monarchs in Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Tibet, China, and Japan. That template is still politically live.

Materiality. The stupa-building programme, legendary in its numbers but real in its existence, entrenched the relic cult and the pilgrimage network that the archaeological record shows dominating Indian Buddhist practice.

Common questions #

Was Ashoka a Buddhist? Yes, by his own statement: he declares himself an upasaka, expresses reverence for the Three Jewels, recommends Buddhist texts, and visits Buddhist sites. Whether he ruled as a Buddhist, as opposed to ruling a plural empire with a deliberately ecumenical public ethic, is the more interesting question, and the answer is closer to the latter.

Did he really convert because of Kalinga? The Minor Rock Edict’s chronology complicates the clean conversion story: his interest in dhamma appears to develop over years rather than in a single moment, and his becoming a lay follower may precede rather than follow the campaign, depending on how the regnal years are read. The remorse in Edict XIII is his own statement and there is no reason to doubt it; the dramatic before-and-after is a legendary shape imposed on it.

Did he ban animal slaughter? He restricted it substantially. Rock Edict I records the reduction of killing for the royal kitchen to two peacocks and a deer, with the intention of ending even that, and bans certain sacrifices and festivals. Pillar Edict V lists protected species and prohibits particular practices on particular days. It is regulation and reduction rather than a general prohibition, and it sits alongside his provisions for medical treatment for humans and animals, wells, and shade trees along roads.

Was Nalanda founded by Ashoka? No. The great monastery at Nalanda dates from the Gupta period, around the fifth century CE, though later tradition associated an earlier structure there with Ashoka, as it associated a great deal with him.

Sources & further reading #

Romila Thapar, Aśoka and the Decline of the Mauryas (Oxford, 3rd ed. 2012) — the standard historical study, with translations of the edicts appended. John S. Strong, The Legend of King Aśoka: A Study and Translation of the Aśokāvadāna (Princeton, 1983) — the legendary tradition and what it was for. Ven. S. Dhammika (trans.), The Edicts of King Asoka (Buddhist Publication Society, 1993) — an accessible complete translation. Charles Allen, Ashoka: The Search for India’s Lost Emperor (Little, Brown, 2012) — on Prinsep, the decipherment, and the rediscovery. Patrick Olivelle (ed.), Aśoka in History and Historical Memory (Motilal Banarsidass, 2009) — recent scholarship on the gap between the two.