Introduction
Devi, also called Vidisha Mahadevi in some accounts, was a wife of Ashoka married before his accession to the imperial throne, traditionally named as the mother of his children Mahendra and Sanghamitra.
Family
- Spouse: Ashoka (married)
- Children: Mahendra, Sanghamitra
Mother of the Sri Lankan Mission
Sri Lankan chronicle tradition (the Mahavamsa) gives Devi particular prominence as the mother of the two children credited with formally establishing Buddhism in Sri Lanka, a legacy that, in the chronicle's own telling, places her at the origin point of one of the most consequential religious transmissions in South and Southeast Asian history, even though her own independent activities beyond this maternal role receive relatively little separate attention in the surviving textual tradition.
This article records the Maurya Empire (c. 4th-2nd century BCE) as historical genealogy reconstructed from Ashoka's own rock and pillar edicts, Greek and Latin accounts of contact with the Mauryas, and later Buddhist, Jain and Puranic traditions composed well after the events they describe; where these traditions genuinely disagree, that disagreement is noted rather than resolved into invented certainty.