It relates how Bimbisara, King of Magadha, looking out from his palace, saw an unknown ascetic, and feeling he was no ordinary person went himself to visit him.  It would appear from this that Gotama on leaving his family went down to the plains and visited Rajagaha, the capital of Magadha, now Rajgir to the south of Patna.  The teachers of the Ganges valley had probably a greater reputation for learning and sanctity than the rough wits of the Sakya land and this may have attracted Gotama.  At any rate he applied himself diligently to acquire what knowledge could be learned from contemporary teachers of religion.  We have an account put into his own mouth[313] of his experiences as the pupil of Alara Kalama and Uddaka Ramaputta but it gives few details of his studies.  It would appear however that they both had a fixed system (dhamma) to impart and that their students lived in religious discipline (vinaya) as members of an Order.  They were therefore doing exactly what the Buddha himself did later on a larger scale and with more conspicuous success.  The instruction, we gather, was oral.  Gotama assimilated it thoroughly and rapidly but was dissatisfied because he found that it did not conduce to perfect knowledge and salvation[314].  He evidently accepted his teachers’ general ideas about belief and conduct—­a dhamma, a vinaya, and the practice of meditation—­but rejected the content of their teaching as inadequate.  So he went away.

The European mystic knows the dangers of Quietism[315].  When Molinos and other quietists praise the Interior Silence in which the soul neither speaks nor desires nor thinks, they suggest that the suspension of all mental activity is good in itself.  But more robust seekers hold that this “orison of quiet” is merely a state of preparation, not the end of the quest, and valuable merely because the soul recuperates therein and is ready for further action.  Some doctrine akin to that of the quietists seems to underlie the mysterious old phrases in which the Buddha’s two teachers tried to explain their trances, and he left them for much the same reasons as led the Church to condemn Quietism.  He did not say that the trances are bad; indeed he represented them as productive of happiness[316] in a sense which Europeans can hardly follow.  But he clearly refused to admit that they were the proper end of the religious life.  He felt there was something better and he set out to find it.

The interval between his abandonment of the world and his enlightenment is traditionally estimated at seven years and this accords with our other data.  But we are not told how long he remained with his two teachers nor where they lived.  He says however that after leaving them he wandered up and down the land of Magadha, so that their residence was probably in or near that district[317].  He settled at a place called Uruvela.  “There” he says “I thought to myself, truly this is a pleasant spot and a beautiful forest.  Clear flows the river