and the Feast with which it closes were over, sent out the sixty in different directions, with the words, "Go forth, O mendicants, preaching and teaching." And himself going towards Uruvela, overcame at the Kappāsiya forest, half way thither, the thirty young Bhadda-vaggiyan nobles. Of these the least advanced entered the First, and the most advanced the Third Path: and he received them all into the Order with the formula, "Follow me!" And sending them also forth into the regions round about, he himself went on to Uruvela.
There he overcame, by performing three thousand five hundred miracles, the three Hindu ascetics, brothers, — Uruvela Kassapa and the rest, — who had one thousand disciples. And he received them into the Order with the formula, "Follow me!" and established them in Arahatship by his discourse, when they were seated on the Gayā-sīsa hill, "On the Lessons to he drawn from Fire." And attended by these thousand Arahats, he went to the grove called the Palm-grove, hard by Rājagaha, with the object of redeeming the promise he had made to Bimbīsāra the king.[1]
When the king heard from the keeper of the grove the saying, "The Master is come," he went to the Master, attended by innumerable priests and nobles, and fell down at the feet of the Buddha, — those sacred feet, which bore on their surface the mystic figure of the sacred wheel, and gave forth a halo of light like a canopy of cloth of gold. Then he and his retinue respectfully took their seats on one side.
Now the question occurred to those priests and nobles, "How is it, then? has the Great Mendicant entered as a student in religion under Uruvela Kassapa, or Uruvela Kassapa under the Great Mendicant?" And the Blessed One, becoming aware of their thus doubting within themselves, addressed the Elder in the verse —
- ↑ See above p. 89.
