King Asoka and Buddhism - Urban Dharma

The central issues before the historical analyst are:(1) Why was Aśoka silent on Nyagrodha and MoggaliputtaTissa (or, according to Sanskrit Buddhist sources, Samudraand Upagupta), and why do the Buddhist sources makeno reference whatsoever to the Kalinga war and its emotionalimpact on Aśoka?(2) Does this mutual exclusion minimize the reliability ofeither or both sources?(3) Did the conversion to Buddhism precede or follow thiswar?One of the earliest scholars to be curious about the impressionwhich Aśoka has created to the effect that his spiritual progresswas “his own doing throughout” 24 was T.W. Rhys Davids. Hisassessment of the evidence of Sri Lankan Pali sources was: “I amnot prepared to say, though their evidence is so much later, theremay not be some truth in their views.” Thus implicitly assigningAśoka’s contact with the Saṅgha a date anterior to the Kalingawar, he concluded: “But it is so very likely that one factor at leastin the king’s change of heart may have been the exhortation orconversation of one or other of the Arahats, that we may supposeboth accounts to have been right.” (Emphasis mine.) 25More specific was James M. Macphail. To him, the conversionof Aśoka preceded the Kalinga war. He argued as follows:It is not easy to understand why Aśoka, the head of a great militaryempire that had been acquired in no very remote time byconquest, should have been so deeply affected and consciencestrickenby his experience of what were in those days familiarhorrors of war. There must surely have been some preparationfor so great a change. Possibly the teaching of the followers ofGautama had impressed him more than he himself realized,and the experience of actual bloodshed on a large scale, merely52