148 FOOTFALLS OF INDIAN HISTORY
much more living in the Gandharan provinces at the time of Fa-Hian's journey than in India proper. Also the Birth Stories had become the romance of these provinces, and there were stupas there to the almsgiving of the eyes and of the head, to the giving of his own flesh by the Bodhisattva to redeem a dove, and to the making himself a meal for the starving tigress. We cannot help distinguishing between those countries whose Buddhism was Hinayana and those in which it was Mahayana, as more or less anciently the goal of Buddhist missions. And we note that Udyana, whose name seems to indicate that it had been a royal residence, perhaps the home-county, as it were, of the Kushan dynasty, was entirely Mahayana, and is mentioned under the name of Ujjana, as one of the northern tirthas in the Mahabharata. It would appear, indeed, that when the Himavant began to be parcelled out into a series of Mahabharata stations sometime under the later Guptas, the undertaking was in direct and conscious succession to an earlier appropriation of the regions further west, as stations of the Jatakas, or Birth stories of Buddha. We ought not, in the attempt to follow up some of the thousand and one threads of interest that our traveller leaves for us, to forget the one or two glimpses of himself that he vouch-safes us. Never can one who has read it forget the story of his visit to the cave that he knew on the hill of Gridhrakuta, where Buddha used to meditate, in Old Rajgir :
