ather's royal palace, he sat and meditated under
the Bo-tree on the vanity and misery of human life, but it was at
Rajagriha, "the King's House," that he first began to preach. Rajagriha,
about 40 miles S.S.E. of the modern Patna, was then the capital of one
of the many small kingdoms that had grown up in the broad valley of the
Ganges. It was already an ancient city of some fame, for the Mahabharata
mentions all the five hills which, as the first Chinese pilgrim,
Fa-Hien, puts it, "encompass it with a girdle like the walls of a town."
It was itself a walled city, and some of the walls, as we can still see
them to-day, represent most probably the earliest structure raised in
India by human hands that has survived down to our own times. They were
no jerry-builders then. Strengthened at sundry points by great square
bastions, the walls of Rajagriha measure in places over seventeen feet
in width and eleven or twelve feet in height, and they are faced with
undressed stones three to five feet in length, without mortar or cement,
but carefully fitted and banded together with a core of smaller blocks
not less carefully laid and packed. They merely supplemented and
completed the natural line of defences provided by the outer girdle of
hills, rising to 1200 feet, which shut off Rajagriha from the plain of
Bihar. On one of those peerless days of the cold season in Upper India
when there is not a cloud to break the serenity of the deep blue sky, I
looked up to the mountain Ghridrakuta, on whose slopes Buddha dwelt for
some time after he had found enlightenment at Buddh Gaya, and saw it
just as the second Chinese pilgrim to whom we owe most of our knowledge
of Rajagriha described it--"a solitary peak rising to a great height on
which vultures make their abode." Many had been the revolutions of the
wheel of time since Hiuen-Tsang had watched the circling of the vultures
round the sacred peak some twelve and a half centuries before me, and as
Buddha himself, another twelve and a half centuries earlier, must have
watched them when he miraculously stretched forth his hand through a
great rock to rescue his beloved disciple Ananda from the clutch of the
demon Mara, who had taken on the shape of a vulture. The swoop of those
great birds seemed to invest the whole scene with a new and living
reality. Across the intervening centuries I could follow King Bimbisara,
who reigned in those days at Rajagriha, proceeding along the causeway of
rough