Page:Asoka - the Buddhist Emperor of India.djvu/29

Rh teaching. The total period referred to is consequently somewhere about four years. The conquest of the Kalingas took place in the ninth 'regnal year' ( 261), while the Rock Edict describing that operation was issued four years later in the thirteenth 'regnal year' ( 257). When that edict, which expressly ascribes Asoka's conversion to his remorse for the sufferings caused by the war in the ninth 'regnal year,' is read together with the Minor Rock Edict which traces his progress in virtue for four years, from the condition of a comparatively careless lay disciple to that of a zealous monk, it seems to be a necessary inference that Asoka became a lay disciple under the Buddhist system in his ninth 'regnal year,' immediately after the conquest of Kalinga, that he began to be zealous about two and a half years later, when he had been consecrated for about eleven years, and that he attained to a high standard of zeal more than a year subsequently when he began to issue his religious edicts in his thirteenth 'regnal year,' B. C. 257. He expressly informs us that his earliest inscriptions date from that year. The Minor Rock Edict I, of which seven copies are known, appears to be the first fruits of the epigraphic zeal of the convert, who longed to make everybody as energetic as himself, and resolved that the imperishable record of his 'purpose must be written on the rocks, both afar off and here, and on a stone pillar, wherever a stone pillar exists.' These orders were largely executed and resulted in the