The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c29.12

v1.c29.12

The ensuing period of about twelve years has left little record in documents emanating from the emperor himself. But we may plausibly conjecture that Açoka now entered upon that course of religious foundations which has given him his unique reputation as a builder of Buddhist shrines. Eighty-four thousand religious edifices—a conventional high number in India—are ascribed to him, the chief sites being the places famed as having been visited by Buddha; and he is said to have redistributed among them the relics of Buddha, which were originally portioned between eight favoured cities. The actual records are not at variance with such a supposition. We know that in his thirteenth, and again in his twentieth, year he dedicated cave-dwellings in the Barābar hills for the use of monks of the Ājīvika sect. In his fifteenth year he enlarged the *stūpa* of the Buddha Kanakamuni, not far from Kapilavastu; and during the twenty-first year he personally visited this site and that of Buddha's own birth-place, the garden of Lumbinī, setting up commemorative pillars and in the latter case granting a remission of taxation. In this period would also fall the inscriptions which attest his growing attachment to the Buddhist order and doctrine, that which ordains ecclesiastical penalties for schism¹, and the address to the community of monks, which among the sayings of Buddha, containing nothing that has not been well said, selects certain passages as pre-eminently suited for instruction and meditation².