Pataliputra, Ashoka, and the Councils

Pataliputra was the largest city in India and probably in the world when a Greek ambassador described it in the fourth century BCE, a timber walled capital on the Ganges with hundreds of towers, from which the Mauryan empire was administered. Its most consequential ruler was Ashoka, who after a war of conquest in Kalinga renounced further warfare and had his declarations cut into rock faces and polished stone pillars across the subcontinent.

Those inscriptions are the earliest datable written statements of religious policy in Indian history, and their content is not what a reader might expect. They rarely mention doctrine. They enjoin restraint in speech about other people's sects, provision of medical care for people and animals, respect for parents and for ascetics of every school, and the appointment of officers to look after the welfare of religious communities including Brahmins, Jains and Ajivikas. Ashoka records giving caves to the Ajivikas, a movement that has since vanished.

Theravada tradition places the third Buddhist council at Pataliputra under his patronage, at which a president named Moggaliputta Tissa is said to have settled disputed points and after which missions were despatched, one of them led by Ashoka's son to Sri Lanka, where the Pali canon was later written down. Jain tradition sets an early council in the same city, convened to collect the teachings before they were lost, and the failure of that effort to command universal assent lies behind the division between the Digambara and Svetambara traditions.