- Lived:
- c. 304–232 BCE — born, presumably, in Pāṭaliputra (Patna), capital of the Mauryan empire; ruled that empire for some thirty-six years, from Kandahar in Afghanistan to deep in today's Karnataka; his words survive carved on rocks and pillars across all of it
- Field:
- emperor — third of the Mauryan dynasty — and moral reformer; author of the earliest readable public writing in India
- The Big Idea:
- After slaughtering his way to the conquest of Kalinga, he announced his remorse in stone, renounced further war, and spent three decades publishing — on rocks, in four scripts and three languages — the proposition that a king's job is his subjects' welfare, human and animal, and that everyone's religion deserves respect.
- In their words:
- "Now Beloved-of-the-Gods feels deep remorse for having conquered the Kalingas." (Major Rock Edict XIII, tr. Ven. S. Dhammika)
- If you remember one thing:
- He wrote to the future in a script the future forgot how to read: for close to two thousand years India remembered him, if at all, as a name in king-lists, until a mint official in Calcutta cracked the script in 1837 — and in 1947 the new Republic put his wheel on its flag and his lions on its seal, choosing as its face the one king in history who apologized.