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Ashoka: the Kalinga war, dhamma and the edicts

The Mauryan empire · Part 2 / 3 · Fact-checked on 8 November 2026 · how we check

Written with AI from the sources listed at the bottom of this page, then fact-checked by a separate AI.

Ashoka's rise and titles; the Kalinga war, Major Rock Edict XIII and the Separate Kalinga Edicts; his turn to Buddhism, the Bhabru and schism edicts, the third council and the missions; Lumbini, Nigali Sagar and the Barabar caves; what his dhamma taught and how officials, tours and welfare works spread it; the kinds and sites of the inscriptions, their languages and scripts; and the neighbours and Greek kings they name.

Part 1 showed how Chandragupta and Bindusara built the empire; this part is about the ruler who tried to give it a moral purpose. Ashoka is the first Indian king who speaks to us directly, because he had his messages cut into rocks and polished pillars from Afghanistan to Karnataka and from Nepal to Odisha. Through them we can follow his early career, the war in Kalinga that changed him, his turn to Buddhism, and the code of conduct he called dhamma. We then look at how he spread that code through new officials, tours and welfare works, at the different kinds of inscriptions and where they stand, at the languages and scripts they use, and at the neighbouring peoples and Greek kings they name.

Before he became king, Ashoka served his father as a provincial governor: Buddhist texts send him to put down a revolt at Taxila and place him at Ujjain, the seat of the western province. Bindusara died around 273 BCE, and Buddhist tradition says Ashoka was formally crowned only about four years later, which suggests a struggle for the throne. The Sri Lankan chronicles even claim he killed many of his brothers, but his own edicts refer to the households of his brothers and sisters. In most inscriptions he does not use his personal name at all; he calls himself Devanampiya Piyadasi, 'beloved of the gods, of gracious look'. The name Ashoka appears in only a few minor rock edicts, notably at Maski in Karnataka and Gujarra in Madhya Pradesh, and these finds settled who Piyadasi was.

Eight years after his coronation, around 261 BCE, Ashoka invaded Kalinga, the coastal kingdom roughly matching present-day Odisha. Major Rock Edict XIII, written some years later, gives the cost in the king's own account: about 150,000 people carried away as captives, about 100,000 killed, and many times that number who died afterwards. Ashoka says that he felt deep remorse, and that the suffering of ordinary people caught in the war weighed on him. From then on he declared that the best conquest was conquest by dhamma (dhamma-vijaya), not by arms, and Major Rock Edict IV contrasts the old sound of the war drum with the new call of dhamma. The change had limits, though. He kept Kalinga and his army, and Major Rock Edict XIII itself warns the forest peoples on his borders that the king still has the power to punish them if they do wrong.

Kalinga itself received special treatment. At Dhauli near Bhubaneswar and Jaugada in Ganjam district, the two Major Rock Edict sites inside the conquered land, Major Rock Edicts XI, XII and XIII are left out, so the people of Kalinga were never shown the king's account of their own suffering. In their place stand two Separate Edicts addressed to the officials in charge of the region. In them Ashoka declares that all people are his children, and that he wishes for them the same welfare and happiness in this world and the next that he wishes for his own sons. He tells the officials to avoid anger, haste and cruelty, not to imprison or torture people without cause, and to be fair in judging cases, and he promises to send inspectors to check on them.

Ashoka's own words describe a gradual turn to Buddhism. In a minor rock edict he says he had been a lay follower for more than two and a half years without much zeal, and then, after drawing close to the sangha for over a year, became truly active. The Bhabru edict, found near Bairat in Rajasthan, is addressed to the sangha itself: in it he declares his respect for the Buddha, the Dhamma and the Sangha and recommends a list of Buddhist passages for study. The schism edicts on the pillars at Sarnath, Sanchi and Allahabad order that monks or nuns who split the order should be expelled. Buddhist chronicles add that a third council met at Pataliputra under the monk Moggaliputta Tissa and sent missions abroad, among them Ashoka's son Mahinda and daughter Sanghamitta to Sri Lanka, and other monks to Suvarnabhumi in Southeast Asia.

Ashoka also honoured the places linked with the Buddha. Major Rock Edict VIII says that ten years after his coronation he went to Sambodhi, the site of the enlightenment at Bodh Gaya, and replaced the old royal pleasure tours with tours of dhamma. The pillar at Rummindei, the ancient Lumbini in Nepal, records that he came there in the twentieth year of his reign because the Buddha was born there; he set up a stone pillar, exempted the village from the tax called bali and lowered its share of the crop (bhaga) to one-eighth. A pillar at Nigali Sagar, also in Nepal, says he enlarged the stupa of an earlier Buddha, Konakamana. Yet Ashoka did not favour one faith alone. He had cave shelters cut in the Barabar hills of Bihar and gave them to the Ajivikas, a rival order of ascetics.

The dhamma that Ashoka preached is not the same as Buddhism, though it shares much of its spirit. It is a set of plain duties for everyone: obedience to parents, respect for elders and teachers, generosity to friends, relatives, Brahmanas and shramanas, kind treatment of slaves and servants, and ahimsa towards living creatures. Major Rock Edict XII adds the most quoted idea, tolerance among sects: people should honour other faiths as well as their own, guard their speech and avoid praising their own sect while running down others, so that the essence of every faith may grow. The dhamma says nothing about the four noble truths, nirvana or monastic life, and it names no single god. Historians therefore read it as a practical ethic for a huge empire of many peoples and beliefs.

Ashoka turned his ethic into state policy. Major Rock Edict I bans the killing of animals for sacrifice in the capital and frowns on samajas, festive gatherings he thought harmful, and it says the royal kitchen now kills only two peacocks and a deer, and soon none. Major Rock Edict III orders the rajukas, pradeshikas and yuktas to tour their areas every five years to teach dhamma as well as to do their usual work. Major Rock Edict V records that, thirteen years after his coronation, he created a new rank of officers, the dhamma mahamatta, to work among people of all sects, look after the welfare of prisoners, the old and the poor, and settle disputes. Major Rock Edict II lists welfare works: medical care for people and animals, medicinal plants, wells and shade trees along the roads, not only in his own lands but in those of his neighbours.

The inscriptions fall into a few clear groups, set out in the table below. The fourteen Major Rock Edicts were cut on large rock faces near towns and routes at the edges of the empire, from Shahbazgarhi and Mansehra in the northwest to Kalsi in the Himalayan foothills, Girnar in Gujarat, Sopara on the western coast, Dhauli and Jaugada in Kalinga and Yerragudi in Andhra Pradesh. The shorter Minor Rock Edicts, which carry the personal account of his conversion, are spread widely, with a cluster in Karnataka at Maski, Brahmagiri and Siddapur and others at Rupnath, Sahasram and Bairat. The seven Pillar Edicts stand on polished sandstone pillars in the Ganga plain, at Lauriya-Araraj, Lauriya-Nandangarh, Rampurva and Allahabad, and on two pillars that Firuz Shah Tughlaq carried to Delhi from Topra and Meerut in the fourteenth century; only the Delhi-Topra pillar carries all seven. Minor pillar inscriptions mark sacred sites such as Lumbini and Sarnath.

Ashoka wanted his words understood, so he used the languages and scripts of each region. Most inscriptions are in Prakrit, the spoken language of the time, written in the Brahmi script, which runs from left to right and is the ancestor of most later Indian scripts. In the far northwest, at Shahbazgarhi and Mansehra, the same Prakrit is written in the Kharoshthi script, which runs from right to left and came from the Aramaic script used in the old Persian provinces. Further west, at Kandahar in Afghanistan, there is a bilingual inscription in Greek and Aramaic, and other Aramaic inscriptions have been found at Taxila and Laghman, for subjects who read those languages. Knowledge of Brahmi was lost over the centuries. In 1837 James Prinsep, secretary of the Asiatic Society, deciphered it, which opened all of Ashoka's records to modern readers.

The edicts also map Ashoka's world beyond his borders. Major Rock Edict II names the peoples to the south who were not his subjects: the Cholas, the Pandyas, the Satiyaputras and the Keralaputras, together with Tamraparni, which is taken to be Sri Lanka. This shows that the far south lay outside the empire. Major Rock Edict XIII names five Greek kings in the west whom Ashoka claims to have reached with his dhamma: Antiochus II of Syria, Ptolemy II of Egypt, Antigonus Gonatas of Macedonia, Magas of Cyrene and Alexander of Epirus or Corinth. Western writers say nothing of such missions, so the claim may be larger than the result, but the list shows how well informed the Mauryan court was about the Hellenistic world.

Ashoka's reign joins three threads. The Kalinga war led him to give up further conquest and to speak of conquest by dhamma; his Buddhist faith shaped his gifts, pilgrimages and messages to the sangha; and his dhamma, a simple ethic of duty, kindness and tolerance, became a policy carried out by officials, tours and welfare works across a diverse empire. The inscriptions are the proof of all three, and their placing tells its own story: big rock edicts at the frontiers and on trade routes, pillar edicts in the heartland, and messages in Kharoshthi, Greek and Aramaic for distant subjects. One famous Allahabad pillar shows how long they lasted: besides Ashoka's edicts it carries the praise of the Gupta king Samudragupta and an inscription of the Mughal emperor Jahangir. How the empire was run, how it raised revenue and why it fell apart after him are the subjects of Part 3.

Exam traps

• The Kalinga war came eight years after Ashoka's coronation and is described in Major Rock Edict XIII, which is missing at Dhauli and Jaugada, the sites inside Kalinga.
• 'All people are my children' comes from the Separate Kalinga Edicts, not from Major Rock Edict XIII.
• The name Ashoka appears only in a few minor rock edicts such as Maski and Gujarra; elsewhere he is Devanampiya Piyadasi.
• Tolerance among sects is the theme of Major Rock Edict XII; dhamma mahamattas were created in the thirteenth year (Major Rock Edict V); the five-yearly tours are in Major Rock Edict III.
• The Rummindei pillar records tax relief for Lumbini: freedom from bali and the bhaga cut to one-eighth.
• The Barabar caves were given to the Ajivikas, not to Buddhist monks.
• Kharoshthi (right to left) is used at Shahbazgarhi and Mansehra; Greek and Aramaic at Kandahar; Brahmi elsewhere.
• James Prinsep deciphered Brahmi in 1837; Firuz Shah Tughlaq moved the Topra and Meerut pillars to Delhi; only Delhi-Topra has Pillar Edict VII.

Recap

• Ashoka served at Taxila and Ujjain; Bindusara died about 273 BCE and Ashoka was crowned about four years later; title Devanampiya Piyadasi.
• Kalinga war about 261 BCE (eighth year): Major Rock Edict XIII gives 150,000 captives and 100,000 killed; remorse and dhamma-vijaya.
• Separate Kalinga Edicts at Dhauli and Jaugada replace Major Rock Edicts XI-XIII: 'all people are my children'.
• Buddhism: lay follower (minor rock edict), Bhabru edict to the sangha, schism edicts (Sarnath, Sanchi, Allahabad), third council and missions (Mahinda, Sanghamitta to Sri Lanka).
• Pilgrimage: Sambodhi in the tenth year (Major Rock Edict VIII); Rummindei tax relief; Nigali Sagar stupa of Konakamana; Barabar caves to the Ajivikas.
• Dhamma: duties to parents, elders, teachers, servants and ascetics, ahimsa, tolerance (Major Rock Edict XII); not the same as Buddhism.
• Means: bans on sacrifice and samajas (I), five-yearly tours (III), dhamma mahamattas (V, thirteenth year), welfare works (II).
• Inscriptions: 14 Major Rock Edicts, Minor Rock Edicts, 7 Pillar Edicts, minor pillar and cave inscriptions.
• Prakrit in Brahmi; Kharoshthi in the northwest; Greek and Aramaic at Kandahar; Prinsep deciphered Brahmi in 1837.
• Neighbours: Cholas, Pandyas, Satiyaputras, Keralaputras, Tamraparni (II); five Greek kings (XIII).

Practice questions

Sources

• Centre for Cultural Resources and Training (Ministry of Culture): material on Ashoka, his dhamma and the Mauryan inscriptions — https://ccrtindia.gov.in
• Archaeological Survey of India: site notes on the Ashokan rock and pillar edicts (Dhauli, Jaugada, Girnar, Kalsi, Maski, Sarnath, Sanchi, Barabar) and the texts in the Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum, vol. I — https://asi.nic.in