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THE GREAT BUDDHIST KINGS of Alexander the Great into the northwestern provinces of the Indian subcontinent. Fixing his capital at Pāšaliputra (modern Patna), he was so successful in his consolidation of the states shattered by the romantic Macedonian, that when Seleucus Nicator (the young Alexandrian general who founded the Seleucid dynasty of Persia, immediately following the death of Alexander in 323) attempted to recover the Greek conquests in India, the native armies made such a convincing showing that the invader, suing for peace and friendship, ceded the Punjab and the Kabul valley in exchange for five hundred elephants, gave his daughter to Candragupta in marriage, and in 302 B.C. dispatched Megasthenes as an ambassador to the Mauryan court.
Bindusāra, Candragupta's son, succeeded him in 297 B.C., and is supposed lo have extended the empire southward to Madras. Otherwise his reign was peaceful, and, from the historical point of view, without event. His son, however, King Aśoka (264--227 B.C.), was one of the greatest conquerors and religious teachers of all time.
The conversion of King Aśoka to the Buddhist faith ranks in importance, for the Orient, with the conversion of Constantine the Great to Christianity, for the West. His impcrial patronage lifted what had begun as a doctrine of exacting spiritual exercises to the position of a prosperous and popular, widely propagatcd religion. We are told that when King Asoka instituted, in place of royal hunting-parties, the pious custom of state pilgrimages to the holy places of the Buddha legend, he let be summoned, to serve as guide, the saint who had converted him to the faith. "The great abbot, Upagupta, came from his forest retreat near Mathurā, traveling by boat down the Jumna and Ganges with eighteen thousand members of the Order as companions. At Pāțaliputra they joined the Emperor's suite, and with a splendid military escort the imperial procession started for the Lumbini Garden. There, as an inscribed standard erected by Asoka still
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