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BIDDIIS7 7.1DIA
reign we have no information. In the ninth year a war broke out between Magadha and Kalinga, perhaps the then most powerful kingdom in India still independent of the empire ruled over by Asoka. Of the rights and wrongs of the dispute we cannot judge. Our sole information comes from one side only, and is an incidental reference in the thirteenth Edict, published by Asoka five years afterwards. In that document the King states that it was the reinorse and pity aroused in his mind by the horrors of the conquest—the killing, death by disease, and forcible carrying away of individuals, to which noncombatants and even peaceable brahmins and recluses were exposed—that resulted in his conversion. He does not say to what. That, apparently, was supposed to be quite clear to any one. It was sufficient to say that he had come to the opinion that the only true conquest was conquest by the religion (by the Dhamnına).
We are to!d, by the King himself; of three stages in his conversion. The Rupnath Edict is of about the same date as the last, but perhaps a little earlier, say the thirteenth year after his being formally anointed, or, as we should say, crowned—that is, in the seventeenth year after he became de jure the king. There he says that for two and a half years he had been a lay disciple (an upăsaka), but had not developed much zeal; but one year before before the date of the Edict) lie had entered the Order, and begun to show greater zeal. Then in the eighth Rock Edict he declares that in the thirteenth year after his coronation he had set out for the Sambodhi
Shree Sudharmaswami Gyanbhandar-Umara, Surat
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