Ashoka is the legendary king. There is a religious myth about his birth. There is a story called Ye Xiantu in the Sanskrit Buddhist Tale Collection, which is about a boy named Xiao Ye who happened to meet the Buddha begging while playing in the street one day. He had nothing to give to the Buddha, so he naively offered a handful of sand. The boy who offered sand was later reincarnated as Ashoka of the Peacock Dynasty, and he owned a large territory of India.

As the grandson of King Chandragupta, the pioneer of Indian Peacock Dynasty, Ashoka inherited the tradition of bellicose expansion of his ancestors and unified the whole India except the southern tip of Indian Peninsula during his reign.