Ashoka, Chandragupta's grandson, took the Mauryan throne around 268 BCE and, according to his own later inscriptions, underwent a change of policy after a bloody conquest of Kalinga, turning toward Buddhism and a program of rule he called Dhamma, a term closer to a broad ethical policy than a doctrinal conversion in the narrow sense. He then had edicts recording that policy inscribed on rocks and pillars across the empire, from Afghanistan to southern India, in Prakrit and other regional scripts, giving historians a body of contemporary imperial religious statement without real parallel elsewhere in the ancient world at that date.
An edition of the inscriptions collects and translates this corpus, and the edicts themselves describe measures including bans on animal sacrifice at the court, the planting of shade trees and digging of wells along roads, and the dispatch of officials charged with promoting Dhamma, alongside more directly religious content endorsing tolerance among Buddhist, Brahmanical, Jain and Ajivika teachers alike. The empire declined rapidly after Ashoka's death in the 230s BCE, and a study of that decline argues the Mauryan state's scale and administrative reach had always outrun its institutional depth, a fragility Ashoka's Buddhist patronage did not by itself correct, whatever else it accomplished.