and moral projects “for the welfare of man and beast,” such as lecturing his subjects on their duties towards all living creatures, governing the Church, building hospitals and stupas, supervising charities and despatching missions.  In all his varied activity there is nothing unsuitable to an ecclesiastical statesman:  in fact he is distinguished from most popes and prelates by his real indifference to secular aspirations and by the unusual facilities which he enjoyed for immediately putting his ideals into practice.

Asoka has won immortality by the Edicts which he caused to be engraved on stone[580].  They have survived to the present day and are the most important monuments which we possess for the early history of India and of Buddhism.  They have a character of their own.  A French writer has said “On ne bavarde pas sur la pierre,” and for most inscriptions the saying holds good, but Asoka wrote on the rocks of India as if he were dictating to a stenographer.  He was no stylist and he was somewhat vain although, considering his imperial position and the excellence of his motives, this obvious side of his character is excusable.  His inscriptions give us a unique series of sermons on stones and a record, if not of what the people of India thought, at least of what an exceptionally devout and powerful Hindu thought they ought to think.

Between thirty and forty of these inscriptions have been discovered, scattered over nearly the whole of India, and composed in vernacular dialects allied to Pali[581].  Many of them are dated by the year of the King’s reign and all announce themselves as the enactments of Piyadassi, the name Asoka being rarely used[582].  They comprise, besides some fourteen single edicts[583], two series, namely: 

(1) Fourteen Rock Edicts, dating from the thirteenth and fourteenth years of Asoka’s reign[584] and found inscribed in seven places but the recensions differ and some do not include all fourteen edicts.

(2) Seven Pillar Edicts dating from the 27th and 28th years, and found in six recensions.

The fourteen Rock Edicts are mostly sermons.  Their style often recalls the Pitakas verbally, particularly in the application of secular words to religious matters.  Thus we hear that righteousness is the best of lucky ceremonies and that whereas former kings went on tours of pleasure and hunting, Asoka prefers tours of piety and has set out on the road leading to true knowledge.  In this series he does not mention the Buddha and in the twelfth edict he declares that he reverences all sects.  But what he wished to preach and enforce was the Dhamma.  It is difficult to find an English equivalent for this word[585] but there is no doubt of the meaning.  It is the law, in the sense of the righteous life which a Buddhist layman ought to live, and perhaps religion is the simplest translation, provided that word is understood to include conduct and its consequences in another world but