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Updated: June 16, 2025
When leaving to return to his own country, Kanishka renewed Asoka's gift of all Kashmir to the Buddhist Church." This compilation was also called Jñâna-prasthâna. He then made a proclamation inviting all who had heard the Buddha preach to communicate what they remembered.
Even so severe a critic of Sinhalese tradition as Vincent Smith admits that the evidence for the council is too strong to be set aside, but it must be confessed that it would be reassuring to find some allusion to it in Asoka's inscriptions. He did not however always say what we should expect.
No evidence substantiates the later stories which represent him as a monster of wickedness before his conversion, but according to the Dîpavaṃsa he at first favoured heretics. The general effect of Asoka's rule on the history of Buddhism and indeed of Asia is clear, but there is still some difference of opinion as to the date of his conversion.
But it was a Buddhism already far removed from the purity of Asoka's reign. The most striking feature of this short-lived revival is the artistic inspiration which it derived from Hellenistic sources, of which the museums of Peshawar and Lahore contain so many remarkable illustrations.
Asoka's Bhâbrû Edict contains the saying: Thus the good law shall long endure, which is believed to be a quotation and certainly corresponds pretty closely with a passage in the Anguttara-Nikâya . The King's version is Saddhamma cilathitike hasati: the Pali is Saddhammo cîratthitiko hoti. Somewhat similar may have been the differences between the Buddha's speech and the text which we possess.
Besides, if it had been written during the Buddhist ascendency, one fancies we should find more Buddhism in it than we do. There is some; there are ideas that would be called Buddhist; but that really only prove the truth of the Buddha's claim that he taught nothing new. But a Poem written in Asoka's reign, one fancies, would not have been structurally and innately, as the Mahabharata is, martial.
Why before Buddha? Why, then, should we not ascribe the epics to this Buddhist Kshattriya period? To Asoka's reign itself, for example? Well, it has been done; but probably not wisely.
Asoka's strong dislike of killing or hurting animals cannot be ascribed to policy, for it must have brought him into collision with the Brahmans who offered animals in sacrifice, but was the offspring of a naturally gentle and civilized mind. We may conjecture that the humanity of Buddhism was a feature which attracted him to it.
And the tradition seems on the whole correct: the united evidence of texts and inscriptions goes to show that the Buddhists of Asoka's time held the chief doctrines subsequently professed by the Sinhalese Church and did not hold the other set of doctrines known as Mahayanist.
From time to time I have drawn attention to such cases in this work, but as a rule the foreign ideas are so thoroughly mastered and indianized that they cease to be obvious. They merely open up to Indian thought a new path wherein it can move in its own way. In the period following Asoka's death Buddhism suffered a temporary eclipse.
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