Page:Asoka - the Buddhist Emperor of India.djvu/49

47 adopted the Christian creed himself, his successors would have been compelled to do so, but if Asoka had withheld his heartfelt adherence to the teaching of Buddha there is no reason to suppose that the doctrine had strength enough to impose itself upon the faith of India and half of the civilized world. Gautama Buddha lived, moved, and died within a small territory in and near Magadha, and there is no indication that during the interval of three centuries which elapsed between his death and the dispatch of missions by Asoka the Buddhist teaching had made any great noise in the world or was known beyond very narrow limits, nor is there any reason to believe that Asoka was constrained by political reasons to make a virtue of necessity and yield to the demands of an imperious priesthood. We watch in the personal records drafted by himself the gradual growth of his sincere convictions and the orderly development of the policy which consecrated his immense autocratic power and diplomatic influence as the sovereign of one of the greatest empires in the world to the service of the religion which had captured his heart and intellect.

An abstract of the monastic legends of Ceylon and India which purport to describe the conversion of Ceylon will be found in Chapters VI and VII. They cannot be accepted as history, and, in reality, the conversion of the island must have been a process much slower then it is represented to have been. But we do not possess any authoritative account of what actually happened. The Edicts, as now