Buddhist India c19.29

c19.29

We are told, by the King himself, of three stages in his conversion. The Rupnath Edict is of about the same date as the last, but perhaps a little earlier, say the thirteenth year after his being formally anointed, or, as we should say, crowned—that is, in the seventeenth year after he became *de jure* the king. There he says that for two and a half years he had been a lay disciple (an *upāsaka*), but had not developed much zeal; but one year before (before the date of the Edict) he had entered the Order, and begun to show greater zeal. Then in the eighth Rock Edict he declares that in the thirteenth year after his coronation he had set out for the *Sambodhi* —that is to say, he had set out, along the Aryan Eightfold Path, towards the attainment (if not in his present life then in some future birth as a man) of the state of mind called Arahatship.¹ So in the ninth year of his reign an Upāsaka, in the eleventh year a Bhikshu, in the thirteenth, still reaching upward, he enters the Path.