Buddhist tradition remembers Ashoka as the ideal patron: a wicked king converted, who built stupas beyond counting, convened a council, purified the order and sent out the missions that carried the teaching abroad. The chronicles of Sri Lanka in particular depend on him, since the mission led by his son is the foundation of their own church.
The edicts complicate this. Ashoka does declare himself a lay follower, records a visit to the Buddha's birthplace, and addresses the monastic community about schism and about texts monks should study. But the dhamma he preaches in the edicts addressed to the general population is largely a civic ethic: obedience to parents, generosity to ascetics and brahmins, truthfulness, restraint in killing, and respect between religious communities. The specifically Buddhist doctrines, the four noble truths, dependent origination, nirvana, are essentially absent, and other religious communities are named for support alongside the Buddhist order.
Scholars accordingly divide between reading the edicts as a Buddhist king's policy addressed prudently to a plural population, and reading them as a genuinely non-sectarian programme by a ruler who was personally Buddhist. Both readings are defensible from the same texts. What the edicts undoubtedly establish is the first case of a great state patronising Buddhism, and the first surviving articulation of religious tolerance as state policy anywhere.