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.