dant Pali, Sanskrit, and Chinese accounts, every place has been exactly determined, the recent finding of the very bones of the body of Buddha in the inscribed casket which his family had deposited beneath the great mound at Piprawah adding the last historic link in the chain, and leaving the life of Gautama Buddha an open book.
Very evidently no other place in India has such historical importance, and yet no place is so seldom visited by the legion of winter tourists, as this Buddha-Gaya of modern Behar, the Uruwela of ancient Magadha, the birthplace of one of the world's greatest religions. Until Lord Elgin's visit in 1895, no viceroy had sought this most ancient and historic spot in the empire. Outward India and the life of the people have changed so little that one easily pictures the scenes occurring twenty-five centuries ago in the same setting—when the Great Knight, Siddhartha, the Rajput, having made the Great Renunciation, left family and home and high estate on the full-moon night of July, and, with his five disciples, journeyed southward from his capital at Kapilavastu to Rajagriha, and finally along the river bank to the jungles of Uruwela, where, for six years, he practised the most rigorous penance, self-torture, and mortification. When he had reduced himself to living on one grain of rice a day, he fell as in death; and then, convinced of the uselessness of such a life of extreme bodily penance, he partook of food. His disciples forsook this starved ascetic for so basely yielding to the body, and the monk Gautama wandered to the river
