Page:History of India Vol 2.djvu/185

 LEGENDS OF ASOKA 151 The rank growth of legend which has clustered round the name of Asoka bears eloquent testimony to the commanding influence of his personality. In the Buddhist world his fame is as great as that of Charle- magne in mediaeval Europe, and the tangle of mytho- logical legend which obscures the genuine history of Asoka may be compared in mass with that which drapes the figures of Alexander, Arthur, and Charlemagne. The Asoka legend is not all either fiction or myth, and includes some genuine historical traditions, but it is no better suited to serve as the foundation of sober history than the stories of the Morte d' Arthur or Pseudo-Kallisthenes are adapted to form the bases of chronicles of the doings of the British champion or the Macedonian conqueror. This obvious canon of criti- cism has been forgotten by most writers upon the Maurya period, who have begun at the wrong end with the late legends, instead of at the right end with the contemporary testimony found in the various edicts of the great king himself. The legends have reached us in two main streams, the Ceylonese and the North Indian. The accident that the Ceylonese varieties of the stories happen to be re- corded in books which assume the form of chronicles with a detailed chronology, and have been known to European readers for seventy years, has given to the southern tales an illusory air of authenticity. The earli- est of the Ceylonese chronicles, the Dipavamsa, which was probably compiled late in the fourth century A. D., is some six centuries posterior to the death of Asoka,