Page:Asoka - the Buddhist Emperor of India.djvu/41

Rh difficulty somehow, and the parallel cases enable us to understand how the business could be settled in more ways than one.

Having now defined the nature of the dhaṁma, or Law of Piety, which Asoka made it the business of his life to preach and propagate, and having shown how the apparently inconsistent rôles of monk and monarch could be reconciled in practice, we may resume his life story. We have seen that his ninth 'regnal year' (B.C. 261) was the turning-point of his career, that he then began to love, protect, and preach the Buddhist Law of Piety as a lay disciple, and that two and a half years later he assumed the monastic robe, abolished the Royal Hunt, and instituted 'pious tours.'

The memory of such a 'pious tour' in his twenty-first 'regnal year' (B. C. 249) is preserved by the commemorative records on the Rummindeî and Niglîva pillars in the Nepalese Tarâi, where there is reason to believe that other similar pillars exist. Those records prove that Asoka visited the 'Lumbini garden,' the traditional scene of the birth of Gautama Buddha, and also paid reverence to the stûpa of Konâkamana, or Kanakamuni, the 'former Buddha,' which he had already enlarged six years earlier. It is interesting