The thirteenth major rock edict describes the conquest of Kalinga, counts the deported, the dead and those who died afterwards, and says that the king felt remorse. It is an extraordinary document for a conquering monarch to publish, and it is the pivot of the whole corpus: from that point the edicts turn to a programme the king calls dhamma.
What dhamma means in the edicts is narrower and stranger than the word suggests. It is a public ethic rather than a body of doctrine: restraint in speech, generosity to brahmins and ascetics of every school, obedience to parents and elders, care in the treatment of servants and animals, and the appointment of officers to promote it. The edicts endow no monasteries in the way later tradition claims, and they take care to name the Buddhist community alongside the Ajivikas, the Jains and the brahmins. A ruler's ethic addressed to a plural population is not the same thing as a state religion, and reading the two as identical is the most common error made about him.
The later Buddhist tradition, above all the Sri Lankan Mahavamsa and the north Indian Divyavadana, tells a fuller and far more dramatic story: a bloodstained youth, a mass conversion, eighty four thousand stupas, and the patronage of a great council at Pataliputra. None of that council appears in the inscriptions. The two Ashokas, the one who speaks in stone and the one the chronicles built, are both historically important, and they are not the same figure.