TheIndosphere

An encyclopedia of Indian civilization.

BuddhistPolitical & SecularEarly Historic

Ashokan edicts

Also known as Edicts of Ashoka

The Ashokan edicts are inscriptions on rocks and pillars across the subcontinent issued by the Mauryan emperor Ashoka in the third century BCE, the earliest deciphered Indian writing and the earliest direct testimony of an Indian ruler.

The corpus

The edicts fall into groups: major and minor rock edicts, inscribed on boulders at the edges of the empire; pillar edicts, cut on polished sandstone columns in the Gangetic heartland; cave inscriptions dedicating shelters to Ajivika ascetics; and separate inscriptions at particular sites.

They are found from Kandahar, on ancient India’s north-western frontier (modern-day Afghanistan), to Karnataka, and are written in Prakrit in Brahmi and Kharoshthi scripts, with Greek and Aramaic versions in the north-west — the Kandahar bilingual being of particular importance.

Contents

The edicts announce Ashoka's dhamma: respect for parents and elders, generosity to ascetics and brahmins, restraint in speech, care for animals, tolerance among sects, and the appointment of officers to oversee welfare. The thirteenth rock edict describes the conquest of Kalinga, the remorse the slaughter caused, and the turn to dhamma — the only such statement by an ancient ruler anywhere.

Practical measures are recorded: the planting of trees and digging of wells along roads, medical provision for humans and animals, restrictions on animal slaughter, and the sending of envoys, including to named Hellenistic kings, which supplies the chronology of Ashoka's reign.

Decipherment

The Brahmi script was read by James Prinsep in 1837, and the edicts were the material on which he worked. The king who issued them called himself Devanampiya Piyadasi, and his identification with Ashoka of the Buddhist literary tradition was established only when an edict giving the name Ashoka was found.

This recovered a major emperor who had been effectively lost to history, and the edicts remain the primary evidence for the Mauryan empire, against which the literary and Buddhist accounts are checked.

Reading them

The edicts are royal proclamations and should be read as such. Ashoka's dhamma as stated in them is a broad ethic of social conduct rather than a specifically Buddhist creed, and the relation between the pious king of the inscriptions and the Ashoka of Buddhist legend is a real historiographical problem.

Further reading

  • Bodhi, Bhikkhu. In the Buddha's Words. Wisdom Publications, 2005
  • Gethin, Rupert. The Foundations of Buddhism. Oxford University Press, 1998
  • Gombrich, Richard F. Theravada Buddhism: A Social History. Routledge, 2006
  • Gombrich, Richard F. What the Buddha Thought. Equinox, 2009
  • Harvey, Peter. An Introduction to Buddhism. Cambridge University Press, 2013

See also

This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.