Page:Asoka - the Buddhist Emperor of India.djvu/44

42 as the date from which Asoka began to exert himself strenuously as Head of the Church and prophet of the dhaṁma, was marked, not only by the abolition of the Royal Hunt and the substitution of tours devoted to works of piety for the pleasure excursions of other days, but by a much more important measure, the most important ever taken by Asoka, and one which to this day bears much fruit. In or about the year mentioned he took the momentous resolution of organizing a network of preaching missions to spread the teaching of his Master, not only throughout and on the borders of his own wide empire, but in the distant regions of Western Asia, Eastern Europe, and Northern Africa. Rock Edict XIII, published with the rest of the Fourteen Rock Edicts in the fourteenth 'regnal year' (B. C. 256), gives a detailed list of the countries to which the imperial missionaries of the Law of Piety had been dispatched. We are told that His Majesty sought the conversion of even the wild forest tribes, and that missions were sent to the nations on the borders of his empire, who are enumerated as the Yonas, Kâmbojas, Nâbhapamtis of Nâbhaka, Bhojas, Pitenikas, Ândhras, and Pulindas, that is to say, various more or less civilized tribes occupying the slopes of the Himalaya, the regions beyond the Indus, and parts of the Deccan and Central India, which were under imperial control, although not included in the settled provinces administered by the emperor or his viceroys. Envoys were also sent, as far as the Tâmraparni river, to the Chola and