The edicts survive in three groups. The minor rock edicts are the earliest and the briefest. The fourteen major rock edicts, cut at the edges of the empire from Girnar in the west to Dhauli in the east and Kandahar in the northwest, carry the substance. The pillar edicts, on polished sandstone columns with animal capitals, come late in the reign.
Their subject is what the emperor calls dhamma, a word he never defines doctrinally. What he lists instead is conduct: obedience to parents and elders, courtesy to servants, generosity to brahmins and to ascetics of every persuasion, restraint in expenditure and in acquisition, and above all abstention from injury to living beings. He records that the royal kitchen has cut its slaughter of animals to two peacocks and a deer, and that even that will stop. He records the digging of wells, the planting of shade trees along roads, and the provision of medical herbs for people and for animals.
Two passages are quoted more than the rest. In the thirteenth major rock edict Ashoka describes the conquest of Kalinga, the deportations and the dead, and states that he feels remorse, and that the sound of the drum has been replaced by the sound of dhamma. In the twelfth he instructs that all sects be honoured, that a man who exalts his own sect while disparaging another damages his own, and that concord is better than separate praise.