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In the preface, the editor writes that these papers grew out of a conference scheduled in 1987, one that had to be canceled because participants were unwilling to travel to Sri Lanka in troubled times. Yet, two pages later in the acknowledgments, the reader discovers that four of the seven chapters comprising this collection were actually published before 1987 as parts of other books or as articles in journals. The seven essays comprising this volume include Richard Gombrich's "Asoka-The Great Upas.aka," Romila Thapar's "Asoka and Buddhism as Reflected in the Asokan Edicts," Ananda W. P. Guruge's "Emperor Asoka and Buddhism: Unresolved Discrepancies between Buddhist Tradition and Asokan Inscriptions," and "Emperor Asoka's Place in History: A Review of Prevalent Opinions," N. A. Jayawickrama's "Asoka's Edicts and the Third Buddhist Council," Anuradha Seneviratna's "Asoka and the Emergence of a Sinhala Buddhist State," and John Strong's "Images of Asoka: Some Indian and Sri Lankan Legends and Their Development." Since the...