colour the topaz, the amethyst and the opal, were patterned
into an enamel of incomparable beauty.
Moved by the beauty of the landscape, the Buddha
stayed his steps. A quiet joy welled up within him as his
heart greeted those familiar forms, bound up with so many
memories: the Grey Horn, the Broad Vale, the Seer’s Crag,
the Vultures’ Peak — “whose noble summit towers, rooflike,
over all the rest.” And then there was Vebhāra, the
mountain of the hot springs, under whose shadow, in the
cave beneath the Satapanni tree, the young homeless
wanderer had found his first retreat, his first resting‐place
on the final journey from Samsāra to Nirvāna.
For when, in that now remote time — “while still
young, a black‐haired young man in the flower of his
youth, in the prime of life, though his mother and father
wished otherwise and grieved with tearful faces, he
shaved off his hair and beard, put on the ochre robe and
went forth from the home life into homelessness” — he
had left his royal father’s house in the northern country of
the Sākyas and had turned his steps toward the valley of
the Gangā. And there, under the shadow of lofty Vebhāra,
he had allowed himself his first lengthy stay, going every
morning into Rājagaha for alms‐food.
It was at that time also, and in that very cave, that
the young Bimbisāra, King of Magadha, had visited him
seeking to persuade him to return to the home of his
fathers and to the life of the world — although his efforts
had been in vain. At length the royal visitor, strangely
moved by the words of the young ascetic, had felt the first
tremblings of a new faith that later made him a follower of
the Buddha.
Fifty years had passed since that day, and in the
interval he had changed not only the course of his own
life but also that of the world. How vast the difference
between that past, when he dwelt in that humble cave
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and sat beneath the Satapanni tree, and the present. Then
he was simply a seeker — one struggling for liberation.
Terrible spiritual contests lay before him — six long years
of self‐inflicted mortification, inhuman agonies that were
as sickening as they were fruitless, just the description of
which made the flesh of even the stoutest‐hearted listeners
creep.
Eventually, having risen above all such self‐torturing
asceticism, through profound meditation, he had reached
the Light, the realisation of Nirvāna, had left the conflict
behind him and was dedicated to the enlightenment of all
living beings. Filled with a divine compassion, he became
a supreme and perfect Buddha.
Those had been the years in which his life had
resembled a changeful morning in the rainy season —
dazzling sunshine alternating with deepest gloom, as the
monsoon piles cloud above cloud in towering masses and
the death‐laden thunder‐storm comes growling nearer. But
now his life was filled with the same calm sunny peace
that lay upon the evening landscape, a peace that seemed
to grow ever deeper and clearer as the sun’s disc dipped
towards the horizon.
For him too sunset, the close of life’s long day, was
at hand. He had finished his work. The dispensation of the
Dharma had been established on sure foundations and
the liberating teaching had been proclaimed to all human‐
kind; many monks and nuns of blameless life and
transcendent knowledge — and both women and men lay
followers were now fully capable of sustaining this Realm
of Truth, and upholding and spreading its teachings.
And, even as he stands there, there abides in his
heart, as a result of the reflections of this day spent in
solitary travelling, the inalienable knowledge:— For you
the time is coming, and soon, when you shall depart from
here and leave this world which you, and many who have
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followed you, have transcended, and there will be the
peace of Final Nirvāna.
And looking over the land spread out before him
— with a joyful recollection within which there lay a note
of deep poignancy — he bade this belovèd land farewell.
“What beauty you possess, Rājagaha, City of the
Five Hills. How lovely your landscapes, how richly blessed
your fields, how gladdening your wooded glades gleaming
with waters, how stately your clustering hills of rock.
For the last time I now look down upon your graceful
borders from this, the fairest of all places from which your
children love to gaze upon your face. Only once more —
on the day when the Tathāgata goes forth from here and
looks back from the crest of that far mountain ridge —
shall he see you again, belovèd valley of Rājagaha; after
that, never more.”
And still the Master stood, until finally only two
structures of all in the city before him towered in the
golden sunlight: one, the highest pinnacle of the palace
from which King Bimbisāra had first espied him when, as
a young and unknown ascetic, he had passed that way
and, by his noble bearing, called himself to the notice of
the King of Magadha; the other, the dome‐like super‐
structure of the great temple in which, in the years before
his teaching had delivered the people from bloody super‐
stition, thousands upon thousands of innocent animals
had been annually slaughtered in honour of some deity.
Finally even the pinnacles of the towers slipped
down into the rising sea of shadow and were lost to view,
and only the cone of golden parasols still glowed. Rising
one above another, they crowned the dome of the temple,
suspended as if in mid‐air, flashing and sparkling as the
red glow deepened against the dense cobalt blue back‐
ground of the tall tree‐tops.
At this point the Master caught sight of the still
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