Ashoka was the third emperor of the Maurya, a dynasty between the 4th and 2nd centuries B.C. He dominated almost the entirety of India, Pakistan and part of Afghanistan. With skill and military might, the Mauryas gradually expanded from Pataliputra (Patna), the capital of the kingdom, located in the Ganges River basin, until Ashoka managed to unify the entire territory of India for the first time in history.
Towards the year 262 B.C., eight years after his accession to the throne, Ashoka undertook a military campaign to annex this territory that was crowned with success. According to the estimates of the king himself, 150.000 people were deported and another 100.000 died, many more who subsequently succumbed to their wounds. By stepping on the battlefield and seeing with his own eyes the mountains of piled up corpses and the tears of the vanquished, Ashoka understood that the conquest of a kingdom meant death and destruction for all, whether friends or enemies, and misfortune for those captives that they would be far from their families and their land.
After seeing this massacre, a new Ashoka emerged, a sovereign who, truly contrite, wished to purify his soul in the desolation that he had provoked with a single order of his. This was expressed in one of his edicts engraved on stone: "The beloved of the gods felt remorse for the conquest of Kalinga, because when a country is conquered for the first time killings, death and deportation of people are very sad for the beloved of the gods and weigh heavily on his soul ».
For a year and a half, Ashoka invited scholars from all over the kingdom to participate with him in intense philosophical debates, seeking the peace that his life as a warrior had denied him. But it would be Buddhism, the influential contemplative religion that had emerged in northern India in the sixth century B.C., that would calm their concerns. In the tenth year of his reign, Ashoka decided to go on a pilgrimage. For 256 days, the king and his entourage traveled on foot along the banks of the Ganges to reach Sárnath, a suburb on the outskirts of Varanasi (Benares), where Buddha gave his first sermon. Near the sacred city of the Hindus was the town of Bodh Gaya, the place where the bodhi tree was raised, under which Prince Siddartha Gautama became Buddha, "the Enlightened One." At the sight of the tree, Ashoka felt that he himself achieved that enlightened serenity he needed and erected a temple right there. Thereafter he called himself Dharma Ashoka or "Ashoka the pious".
Condemning the glory that had reached with the arms, Ashoka decided to dedicate itself to preach its new faith: the dharma or the doctrine of the piety. Ashoka thus tried to humanize a power that he had exercised ruthlessly at the beginning of his reign, becoming the first sovereign in history to expressly renounce conquests and violence. Thus at least he is remembered in the Indian historical tradition, although historians remember that, despite his laments, Ashoka never renounced the conquered kingdom of Kalinga or the use of force, rather than moderate, against the rebellious peoples of the border.
Ashoka founded hundreds of monasteries and sanctuaries, improved communication routes between the main capitals, planted trees to shade walkers and planted the empire of wells to quench their thirst, and erected hospitals and rest areas for the solace of those who entered in their domains and went on a pilgrimage to the holy places of India. Concerned about the international spread of Buddhism, Ashoka asked his own son, Mahendra, to lead a preaching mission to Sri Lanka and sent ambassadors to the distant courts of the West, such as that of King Ptolemy II Philadelphus in Alexandria.
Sometimes, the pacifism of Ashoka has been blamed for weakening the State and propitiating its decadence and dissolution, since, in fact, after its death the Mauryan Empire soon disintegrated. In fact, one tradition maintains that in his later years Ashoka lost control of the kingdom. His grandson, Samprati, alarmed by Ashoka's continued donations to the Buddhist order, forbade the royal treasurer from giving him more funds and finally dethroned him. Despite this, in contemporary India, Ashoka has always been remembered as the most important king in its history. He was the unifier of the country and incarnated in an incomparable way the Buddhist ideal of the universal monarch, chakravartin, "a king who will reign over this world surrounded by seas without oppression, after conquering it without violence, with his justice".