Instructions

Read the passage below and choose the correct answer for the questions.

Every time someone mails a letter or hands over a currency note in India, every time an Indian bureaucrat stamps a document with an official seal, they are handling a symbol that dates back over 2,000 years: four lions sculpted in stone, one facing in each direction. The man who created this potent and enduring icon is a towering mysterious figure in India s history, a king from the third century BC whose ideas - above all, that a ruler must accept the diversity of his subjects' beliefs - were long forgotten but returned to inspire the modern day Indian state.

We know that today by the name Ashoka, to look at he was unprepossessing - a bit of a lens - breaker, as they say in Bollywood: short, fat and famously afflicted by bad skin. Yet he was a lucky man too, known in his lifetime as devanampiya, 'beloved of the gods'. He transformed what was still a nascent sect - Buddhism - into a world religion, transmitting its ethical vision across the subcontinent and the rest of Asia. And, most unusually for a royal- in any country at the time or since he spread his ideas not through violence, but through moral force and persuasion.

Question 141

The symbol the first paragraph describes is that of


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