Ashoka the Great: The Kalinga War and the Dhamma

Ashoka, the third Mauryan emperor, ascended the throne around 268 BCE and ruled for some thirty-seven years. The defining event of his reign was his conquest of the coastal kingdom of Kalinga around 261 BCE, a war whose human cost he himself recorded with striking candor in his thirteenth major rock edict: about one hundred thousand people killed, a hundred and fifty thousand deported, and many more dead of the ensuing famine and disease. Ashoka declared his profound personal remorse for this suffering and renounced further military conquest, a transformation that later tradition links directly to his conversion to Buddhism.