Emperor Ashoka and the Rise of Buddhism

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 1 June 2026 · Updated 29 October 2026

Checked against the primary texts · How we check · Report a correction

Ashoka (reigned c. 270–232 BCE; exact dates disputed) was the third Mauryan emperor of India and, in Ven. S. Dhammika’s words, had “a crucial part to play” in spreading Buddhism through India and abroad. After his bloody conquest of Kalinga he recorded deep remorse, and favoured “conquest by Dhamma,” inscribing a moral vision in stone that still shapes India today.

What did Ashoka do for Buddhism?

Ven. S. Dhammika, introducing his translation of the edicts, writes that Ashoka went on pilgrimage to Lumbini and Bodh Gaya and “sent teaching monks to various regions in India and beyond its borders”; in the Sri Lankan chronicle the Mahāvaṃsa, it was the elder Moggaliputta Tissa who sent Ashoka’s son Mahinda to Sri Lanka, and his daughter Saṅghamittā followed with a branch of the Bodhi tree. He had his moral teachings carved on rocks and pillars across the empire, provided medical treatment for people and animals, and treated the protection of every religion as a duty of the state. In the thirteenth Rock Edict he records that the conquest of Kalinga, eight years after his coronation, left a hundred thousand killed and a hundred and fifty thousand deported, and that afterwards he came to feel “a love for the Dhamma” and “deep remorse for having conquered the Kalingas.” He declared “conquest by Dhamma” to be “the best conquest” (trans. Ven. S. Dhammika).

Kalinga and the change of heart

Ashoka came to the throne of an already-vast empire — the third king of the Mauryan dynasty, after his father Bindusara, in Ven. S. Dhammika’s account — and in his early reign he enlarged it by the sword. The hinge of his life, and of this whole story, was the conquest of Kalinga (modern Odisha). It was a victory, but a hideous one, and Ashoka set down its cost himself, in the thirteenth Rock Edict (where he calls himself “Beloved-of-the-Gods”):

The edict does not say whether this was his first turn to Buddhism. Ven. S. Dhammika, in the introduction to his rendering of the edicts, writes that “it seems that Asoka had been calling himself a Buddhist for at least two years prior to the Kalinga war, but his commitment to Buddhism was only lukewarm and perhaps had a political motive behind it.” The war’s horror, in Dhammika’s reading, “brought about a complete change in his personality,” and he spent the rest of his life trying to apply Buddhist principles to the government of his empire. On that reading, Kalinga marks the deepening of a commitment to the Dharma rather than a first conversion.

Conquest by dharma

In place of military conquest, Ashoka announced a new programme: “conquest by Dhamma.” The edict itself is blunt about it — “Now it is conquest by Dhamma that Beloved-of-the-Gods considers to be the best conquest” — and he says he had it inscribed so that “my sons and great-grandsons may not consider making new conquests” (trans. Ven. S. Dhammika). His dhamma was a broad ethic of decency, summed up in a Minor Rock Edict: “Father and mother should be respected and so should elders, kindness to living beings should be made strong and the truth should be spoken.” This public dhamma was not a statement of Buddhist doctrine. The edicts, Dhammika notes, “say nothing about the philosophical aspects of Buddhism,” since their purpose “was not to expound the truths of Buddhism, but to inform the people of Asoka’s reforms and to encourage them to be more generous, kind and moral.” Dhammika also judges it clear that Ashoka hoped his subjects would adopt his religion; but he was, in Dhammika’s words, “not partisan towards his own religion or intolerant of other religions,” and as a ruler he preached a moral order that people of other faiths could share.

The edicts in stone

Ashoka did something unusual for an ancient monarch: he wrote his conscience across his kingdom. The Edicts of Ashoka are found, Ven. S. Dhammika writes, “in more than thirty places throughout India, Nepal, Pakistan and Afghanistan,” most of them in Brahmi script, with one bilingual edict in Afghanistan in Aramaic and Greek. They “comprise the earliest decipherable corpus of written documents from India,” and Dhammika finds “little doubt” that they were written in Ashoka’s own words rather than in court formula: a ruler’s ethical testament addressed directly to his subjects, though they “give us little information about his life.” From the Lion Capital atop his pillar at Sarnath comes the State Emblem of India, which India’s Ministry of Home Affairs describes, in a notice carried by the Government of Nagaland in March 2025, as “an adaptation from the Sarnath Lion Capital of Asoka”; the wheel beneath the lions — the Ashoka Chakra — sits at the centre of the flag of India to this day.

Welfare and tolerance

The edicts set out a programme of public welfare, and much of it Ashoka records himself in the second Rock Edict: he has “made provision for two types of medical treatment: medical treatment for humans and medical treatment for animals,” and “Along roads I have had wells dug and trees planted for the benefit of humans and animals.” Dhammika’s introduction adds the building of rest houses, reform of the courts to make them “more fair, less harsh and less open to abuse,” and regular amnesties for prisoners. He restricted the slaughter of animals and urged kindness to all living things. And he made tolerance a principle of state: in Dhammika’s summary, “The protection of all religions, their promotion and the fostering of harmony between them, was also seen as one of the duties of the state.” His reasoning is set out in the twelfth Rock Edict: “Whoever praises his own religion, due to excessive devotion, and condemns others with the thought ‘Let me glorify my own religion,’ only harms his own religion. Therefore contact (between religions) is good” (trans. Ven. S. Dhammika). It is a portrait of power turned, deliberately, toward the welfare of the governed.

Patron of the Dharma

For Buddhism, Ashoka’s reign was a turning point. Ven. S. Dhammika credits him with helping the religion spread “both throughout India and abroad,” and says he “probably built the first major Buddhist monuments.” He gave lavish support to the monastic Sangha; the Sri Lankan chronicle the Mahāvaṃsa credits him with monasteries in eighty-four thousand cities and with shrines at the places the Buddha had visited, and the Theravāda chronicles credit him with sponsoring a Third Council at Pāṭaliputra under the elder Moggaliputta Tissa; the northern Buddhist accounts know no separate council under him, which the chronicle’s translator Wilhelm Geiger put down to their having “mistakenly fused the two into one”. Most consequentially of all, he looked outward. In the Mahāvaṃsa’s account he let his son Mahinda and his daughter Saṅghamittā be ordained; after the council, Moggaliputta Tissa sent Mahinda with four other monks to found the religion in Lanka, and Saṅghamittā followed, sent by her father with a branch of the Bodhi tree. The chronicle’s chapter on these missions (ch. XII) has Moggaliputta Tissa send other theras too, “one here and one there,” among them Majjhantika to Kasmīra and Gandhāra. (We tell that wider story in how Buddhism spread.)

History and legend

Ashoka is, unusually for so ancient a figure, well lit by history — because he documented himself, in his own edicts, in his own words. That gives the core of his story a solidity that the lives of figures like Bodhidharma or Padmasambhava lack. Around that core, the later Buddhist tradition did weave its legends — the Ashokāvadāna, for instance, dwells lavishly on his early cruelty as “Ashoka the Fierce” and on the drama of his conversion. But a trustworthy account can rest on the unusually firm ground of the inscriptions: a real emperor, genuinely transformed, who left the record of that transformation carved in stone for us to read.

Why Ashoka matters

Ashoka endures as the model of the Buddhist ruler: monarchs throughout the ancient Buddhist world, Ven. S. Dhammika writes, “were encouraged to look to his style of government as an ideal to be followed.” His ideal of governance by dhamma — ethical, tolerant, non-violent, devoted to the welfare of all — remains a standard against which rulers might still be measured. The emperor who first conquered Kalinga with the sword, and then conquered himself, raised at Sarnath a wheel of the Dharma that turns, even now, at the very heart of a modern nation’s flag. (For the spread he set in motion, see how Buddhism spread; for the symbol he left behind, the Dharma wheel.)