Page:Asoka - the Buddhist Emperor of India.djvu/236

234 gifts to the priesthood. The next day Nigrodha returned to the palace with thirty—two priests, and by preaching the law, established king and people in the faith and the practice of piety. In this manner was King Asoka constrained to abandon the Brahmanical faith of his father, and to accept as a lay disciple the sacred law of Buddha.

These things happened in the fourth year after the accession of King Asoka, who in the same year celebrated his solemn coronation, and appointed his younger brother Tishya to be his deputy or vice-gerent.

The sixty thousand Brahmans, who for three years had daily enjoyed the bounty of Asoka, as they had enjoyed that of his predecessors on the throne, were dismissed, and in their place Buddhist monks in equal numbers were constantly entertained at the palace, and treated with such lavish generosity that four lakhs of treasure were each day expended. One day, the king, having feasted the monks at the palace, inquired the number of the sections of the law, and having learned that the sections of the law were eighty-four thousand in number, he resolved to dedicate a sacred edifice to each. Wherefore, the king commanded the local rulers to erect eighty-four thousand sacred edifices in as many towns of India, and himself constructed the Asokâraâma at the capital. All the edifices were completed within three years, and in a single day the news of their completion reached the Court. By means of the supernatural