, undressed stones, which can be traced to-day to the foot of the
mountain and up its rocky flanks, after his men had "levelled the valley
and spanned the precipices, and with the stones had made a staircase
about ten paces wide," so that he should himself be carried up to wait
in his own royal person on the Lord Buddha. There, marked to the present
day by the remains of two large _stupas_, was the place where the king
alighted from his litter to go forward on foot, and farther up again the
spot where he dismissed his followers and went on alone to invite the
Buddha to come down and dwell in his capital.

That must have been about 500 B.C., and Buddha spent thereafter a
considerable portion of his time in the bamboo garden which King
Bimbisara presented to him on the outskirts of Rajagriha. There, and in
his annual wanderings through the country, he delivered to the poor and
to the rich, to the Brahman and to the sinner, to princes and peasants,
to women as well as to men, his message of spiritual and social
deliverance from the thraldom of the flesh and from the tyranny of
caste.

With the actual doctrines of Buddhism I do not propose to deal. There is
nothing in them that could not be reconciled with those of the Vedanta,
and they are especially closely akin to the Sankhya system. But the
driving force of Buddhism, as also of Jainism, which grew up at the same
time as Buddhism under the inspiration of another great reformer,
Mahavira, who is said to have been a cousin of King Bimbisara, was a
spirit of revolt against Brahmanical Hinduism, and a new sense of social
solidarity which appealed to all classes and castes, and to women as
well as to men. The Vedanta reserved the study of the scriptures to men
of the three "twice-born" castes, and placed it under the supreme
authority of the Brahmans. Both Buddha and Mahavira recognised no such
restrictions, though they did not refuse reverence to the Brahman as a
man of special learning. The religious orders which they founded were
open to all, and these orders included nuns as well as monks. This was
the rock on which they split with Hinduism. This was the social
revolution that, in spite of the religious and philosophical elasticity
of Hinduism, made Buddhists and Jains unpardonable heretics in the eyes
of the Brahmans, and produced a conflict which was to last for
centuries.

Though King Bimbisara welcomed the Buddha to his capital, and Buddhism
made rapid headway amon