King Ashoka, to whom this temple is dedicated, was one of the most celebrated of the Buddhist kings of India. Burnouf in his Introduction a l'Histoire du Buddhisme Indien, has translated a long legend of which Ashoka is the hero, and which is also contained in the Chinese work, Fa-yuen-chu-lin. The commencement in the latter differs a little from that given by Burnouf. Buddha says to Ananda, "You should know that in the city 'Palinput' (Pataliputra), there will be a king named 'The moon protected' (Yue-hu; in Sanscrit, Chandragupta). He will have a son named Bindupala, and he again will have a son Susima." Ashoka was the son of Bindupala by another wife, and succeeded his father as king. The Indian king Sandracottus, who concluded a treaty with Seleucus Nicator, the Greek king of Syria, B.C. 305, was identified with Chandragupta by Schlegel and Wilson. According to the Mahavanso, the Pali history of the Buddhist patriarchs, there was an interval of 854 years from Buddha's death to the accession of Chandragupta, making that event to be in B.C. 389, which is more than half a century too soon. Turnour thinks the discrepancy cannot be accounted for but by supposing a wilful perversion of the chronology. These statements are quoted in Hardy's Eastern Monachism, from Wilson's Vishnu Purana. By this synchronism of Greek and Indian literature, it is satisfactorily shown that Ashoka lived in the second century before Christ, and Buddha in the fourth and fifth. The commonly received chronology of the Chinese Buddhists is too long, therefore, by more than five hundred years. Probably this fraud was effected to verify predictions found in certain Sutras, in which Buddha is made to say that in a definite number of years after his death, such and such things would happen. The

[paragraph continues] Northern Buddhists wrote in Sanscrit, made use of Sanscrit Sutras, and were anxious to vindicate the correctness of all predictions found in them. Burnouf supposes that the disciples of Buddha, would naturally publish their sacred books in more than one language; Sanscrit being then, and long afterwards, spoken by the literati, while derived dialects were used by the common people. By Fa-hien Ashoka is called A-yo Wang, as at the monastery near Ningpo. In Hiuen-tsang's narrative, the name Wu-yeu wang, the "Sorrowless king," a translation of the Sanscrit word, is applied to him.