54 FOOTFALLS OF INDIAN HISTORY
forgotten tongue, the modern organisation of scholarship has to go, to bring back to them the knowledge of Him whom under obscure names they worship to this day, in the very countryside where He lived and taught. A vague tradition of Infinite Mercy is all that remains amongst the un- learned of that wondrous personality. But this, after two thousand years, they cherish still. He belongs in a special degree to this peasantry of Magadha. There runs in their veins the blood of those whom He patted on the head as children. He taught them the dignity of man. He called upon them, as upon the proudest of his peers, to renounce, and find peace in the annihilation of Self. To Gautama Buddha the peasant of Behar owes his place in Hinduism. By him he was nationalised.
Even in those stories of Buddha which remain to us it is explicitly stated that He sought amongst all existing solutions for *the truth. This is the meaning of his travelling with the five ascetics and torturing the body with fasts. The first effort of a new thinker must always be to recapitulate existing systems and sound them to their depths. The Prince Gautama in the year 590 B.C., in the populous districts of the Sakya kingdom, awakening suddenly to the sense of his own infinite compassion, and to the career of a world-thinker, feels an overpowering need to meet with the scholars of his age, and makes his way therefore towards the neighbourhood of Rajgir in the kingdom of Magadha. From purely geographical considerations, we can see
