THE ARTICLE · 7 MIN
Ashoka, the Mauryan emperor of the 3rd century BCE, is one of the few ancient rulers who can still speak to us in his own words. He had edicts carved on rocks and pillars across his empire, many of them in his own voice. He is also the hero of Buddhist chronicles and legends written long after his death: the Sri Lankan Mahavamsa was composed around the start of the sixth century CE, and the Sanskrit Ashokavadana had reached China in translation by about AD 300. The popular story blends the two. Here are eight claims, checked against the edicts, in E. Hultzsch’s 1925 edition and translation, and against the legends.
One note on words: Hultzsch translates the key term dhamma as “morality”.
1. “The Kalinga war killed 100,000 people”
Partly true The figure is real, but it is the king’s own. In Rock Edict XIII he writes: “When king Devanampriya Priyadarsin had been anointed eight years, (the country of) the Kalingas was conquered by (him).” He goes on: “One hundred and fifty thousand in number were the men who were deported thence, one hundred thousand in number were those who were slain there, and many times as many those who died”. The popular figure matches the edict’s count of the slain; in Hultzsch’s translation, the edict claims many more deaths besides, and nothing outside it can check either number.
2. “Seeing Kalinga turned Ashoka into a Buddhist”
Partly true The remorse is in the edict: “This is the repentance of Devanampriya on account of his conquest of (the country of) the Kalingas”. But the edict says it turned him to “morality”, not that it made him a Buddhist, and it names no battlefield scene. A separate edict, found at Rupnath and several other sites, gives its own timeline: “Two and a half years and somewhat more (have passed) since I am openly a Sakya”, a lay follower of the Buddha, and at first “(I had) not been very zealous.” Hultzsch reads the Kalinga war as “the turning-point in his religious career”. That reading rests on how the Rupnath edict is dated, and, in Hultzsch’s words, those edicts “do not specify the years of Asoka’s reign in which his conversion … took place”. Ashoka himself never links the war to the Buddha, and not every source puts the war first.
The Sri Lankan chronicle, the Mahavamsa, tells a different story. It places his conversion in the fourth year of his reign, before the war, and does not tell the Kalinga story at all. Hultzsch’s verdict on its dates: “These dates cannot be reconciled with the epigraphical ones and must be erroneous.”
A striking detail: in Kalinga itself, at Dhauli and Jaugada, the remorse edict was not carved. Hultzsch notes that “two separate edicts were substituted” there, because the sites “formed part of the newly conquered country of Kalinga and required different treatment”.
3. “After Kalinga, Ashoka renounced violence”
Myth as stated. The same edict that expresses remorse also warns the peoples of the forests within his lands: “they are told of the power (to punish them) which Devanampriya (possesses) in spite of (his) repentance, in order that they may be ashamed (of their crimes) and may not be killed.” It asks his descendants not to think “that a fresh conquest ought to be made”, but adds that “if a conquest does please them, they should take pleasure in mercy and light punishments”. His own preferred conquest was “the conquest by morality”. What the edict does set aside is further conquest by arms.
He also kept the death penalty. Pillar Edict IV grants “a respite of three days” to prisoners “who have been condemned to death”, time for appeals and preparation, not abolition. Rock Edict I shows the same step-by-step reform in the royal kitchen: where “many hundred thousands of animals were killed daily for the sake of curry”, only three were now killed, and “even these three animals shall not be killed (in future).”
Even the Buddhist legend does not make him a pacifist. In a 1911 English version of the Ashokavadana, made from Eugène Burnouf’s French, the king, already known for his piety, orders a massacre after an insult to the Buddha: “in one single day eighteen thousand inhabitants suffered death.” It is a story, not evidence of a real massacre. It shows that the gentle pacifist is not the picture even the legend paints.
4. “Ashoka built a Buddhist empire”
Myth Ashoka was openly Buddhist, and a few short edicts deal with the Buddhist order itself, but his major edicts address everyone. Rock Edict XII says the king “is honouring all sects; both ascetics and householders”, and that “other sects ought to be duly honoured in every case.” Twelve years after his consecration, after Kalinga and after he became a lay Buddhist, he gave a cave in the Barabar Hills to the Ajivikas, a non-Buddhist ascetic order: “this Banyan-cave was given to the Ajivikas.”
What the edicts ask of people is everyday ethics: “proper courtesy to slaves and servants, obedience to mother (and) father, liberality to friends, acquaintances, and relatives”, gifts to Brahmins and ascetics alike, and “abstention from killing animals”. Hultzsch observed that the edicts “do not yet know anything of the doctrine of Nirvana”.
5. “Ashoka killed 99 of his brothers to take the throne”
Unverified The story comes from the Mahavamsa, which says that “when he had slain his ninety-nine brothers born of different mothers” he “won the undivided sovereignty over all Jambudipa”. No edict mentions it. Rock Edict V points the other way: it has his officials at work “in the harems of our brothers, of (our) sisters”, that is, in his brothers’ royal households, in the present tense. Hultzsch took this as showing that the tradition that he “had killed all his brothers but one before ascending the throne … is opposed to facts.” That is Hultzsch’s inference: a brother’s household could in principle outlive the brother.
6. “He was ‘Ashoka the Fierce’, ran a prison like Hell, and built 84,000 stupas”
Unverified All three come from the legends, not the edicts. The Mahavamsa says he was called “Candasoka (the wicked Asoka)… by reason of his evil deeds” before becoming “Dhammasoka (the pious Asoka)”. In the Ashokavadana, as rendered in 1911, “he is Chandasoka, Asoka the Furious”, a monk tells the king he has “constructed this dwelling, which is like unto Hell, wherein thousands are put to death”, and after his conversion he “on the same day erected throughout the world eighty-four thousand Stupas”.
These are edifying religious stories, built on a before-and-after shape, and they were written long after him. The edicts give their own before-and-after, a war and a public repentance, and none of these details.
7. “Ashoka’s message reached the Greek kings”
Partly true Rock Edict XIII claims that his “conquest by morality” had been won as far as the lands “where the Yona king named Antiyoka (is ruling)” and four more kings. Hultzsch identifies them as Antiochus II of Syria, Ptolemy II of Egypt, Antigonus Gonatas of Macedonia, Magas of Cyrene, and an Alexander of Epirus or of Corinth. Those names help fix Ashoka’s reign in time: Hultzsch gives, for example, “Antiochus II Theos 261-246”. But this is Ashoka’s claim. We did not find a Greek source recording his envoys. What does survive is his message in Greek: inscriptions found at Kandahar, in Afghanistan, and published in 1958 and 1964 include Greek versions of parts of Rock Edicts XII and XIII, this very edict, made for the Greek community living there, inside his own empire.
8. “India’s national emblem comes from Ashoka”
True, with two details. According to the Government of India, “The State Emblem is an adaptation of the Lion Capital of Asoka at Sarnath”, adopted on 26 January 1950. The national flag’s wheel, “a navy-blue wheel with 24 equally spaced spokes”, represents the Ashoka Chakra. The motto Satyameva Jayate, written below the lions, is part of the modern emblem, not of the ancient capital, and “The bell-shaped lotus was omitted.”
The stone Ashoka also had to be rediscovered. His name survived in Buddhist literature and the Puranas, but the edicts themselves had to be deciphered again: according to Hultzsch, the Delhi-Topra pillar was “the first record of Asoka that was read and translated in 1837 by Prinsep”.
Our reading
The Ashoka of the edicts is more complicated than the pacifist saint. He admits to a war that killed and uprooted hundreds of thousands, says he regrets it, keeps the power to punish, reforms his own kitchen one step at a time, and honours religious groups other than his own. The legends tell a story of transformation. The stone tells a story of a ruler trying to govern by persuasion without giving up force. Both are worth reading; only one is the record.
Sources
- E. Hultzsch, Inscriptions of Asoka, Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum vol. I, new edition (Clarendon Press, for the Government of India, 1925).
- The Mahavamsa, or the Great Chronicle of Ceylon, trans. Wilhelm Geiger (Pali Text Society, 1912).
- Legends of Indian Buddhism, translated from Eugène Burnouf, with an introduction by Winifred Stephens (London, 1911).
- Jean Przyluski, The Legend of Emperor Asoka in Indian and Chinese Texts, trans. D. K. Biswas (Calcutta, 1967).
- Encyclopaedia Iranica, “Aśoka” i (J. G. de Casparis), ii (G. Fussman) and iii (P. O. Skjærvø), 1987.
- Daniel Schlumberger, “Une nouvelle inscription grecque d’Açoka”, Comptes rendus de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 108 (1964), pp. 126-140.
- Government of India, National Portal “Know India”: “State Emblem” and “National Flag” (archived copies, 2026).
Checked September 2026.
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