The Conversion of Ashoka

Ashoka ruled most of the Indian subcontinent in the third century before the common era, and he left an extraordinary thing behind: his own words, cut into rock faces and polished sandstone pillars across his empire, in the local languages of each region and in Greek and Aramaic on the northwestern frontier.

The thirteenth of the major rock edicts is the one that changed how he is read. In it the king describes the conquest of Kalinga, records the numbers deported, killed and dead of other causes, and states that he felt remorse, that the slaughter of even a hundredth of that number would now grieve him, and that he has turned to the pursuit of dhamma. Whatever else it is, it is a public statement by an ancient conqueror that a conquest was a moral failure, and there is nothing else quite like it in the ancient record.

The edicts announce a programme rather than a conversion narrative. They order officers to attend to the welfare of subjects, provide medical treatment for people and animals along the roads, plant trees and dig wells, restrict animal slaughter in the royal kitchen, and instruct that all religious communities be honoured and that praising one's own sect while disparaging another injures both. The inscriptions were unreadable for centuries until James Prinsep deciphered the script in the 1830s.

Buddhist tradition remembers Ashoka as the ideal patron: a wicked king converted, who built stupas beyond counting, convened a council, purified the order and sent out the missions that carried the teaching abroad. The chronicles of Sri Lanka in particular depend on him, since the mission led by his son is the foundation of their own church.

The edicts complicate this. Ashoka does declare himself a lay follower, records a visit to the Buddha's birthplace, and addresses the monastic community about schism and about texts monks should study. But the dhamma he preaches in the edicts addressed to the general population is largely a civic ethic: obedience to parents, generosity to ascetics and brahmins, truthfulness, restraint in killing, and respect between religious communities. The specifically Buddhist doctrines, the four noble truths, dependent origination, nirvana, are essentially absent, and other religious communities are named for support alongside the Buddhist order.

Scholars accordingly divide between reading the edicts as a Buddhist king's policy addressed prudently to a plural population, and reading them as a genuinely non-sectarian programme by a ruler who was personally Buddhist. Both readings are defensible from the same texts. What the edicts undoubtedly establish is the first case of a great state patronising Buddhism, and the first surviving articulation of religious tolerance as state policy anywhere.