Mauryan Empire

Chandragupta Maurya founded the Mauryan Empire around 321 BCE by overthrowing the Nanda dynasty and going on to absorb the Greek satrapies Alexander had left behind in the northwest, building the largest empire the Indian subcontinent had yet seen. Later Jain tradition holds that Chandragupta, late in his reign, abdicated the throne, became a disciple of the Jain teacher Bhadrabahu, and traveled south with him to Shravanabelagola in modern Karnataka, where he is said to have died practicing sallekhana, the Jain rite of fasting to death as a final act of religious discipline.

The tradition survives mainly in later Jain sources rather than in Mauryan era inscriptions, and historians treat the specifics, including the precise date and the extent of Bhadrabahu's own involvement, with some caution, but the story was well established enough by the medieval period that Shravanabelagola became and remains a major Jain pilgrimage site partly on its strength. Whatever its exact historicity, the tradition marks the early Mauryan court as one in which Jainism held real standing well before Ashoka's later and far better documented turn toward Buddhism, and it means the empire's religious character changed dynasty-wide across three generations rather than shifting only once, under Ashoka, as the empire's history is sometimes simplified to.

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.