and pleasant are the bathing places:  all around are meadows and villages.”  Here he determined to devote himself to the severest forms of asceticism.  The place is in the neighbourhood of Bodh-Gaya, near the river now called Phalgu or Lilanja but formerly Neranjara.  The fertile fields and gardens, the flights of steps and temples are modern additions but the trees and the river still give the sense of repose and inspiration which Gotama felt, an influence alike calming to the senses and stimulating to the mind.  Buddhism, though in theory setting no value on the pleasures of the eye, is not in practice disdainful of beauty, as witness the many allusions to the Buddha’s personal appearance, the persistent love of art, and the equally persistent love of nature which is found in such early poems as the Theragatha and still inspires those who select the sites of monasteries throughout the Buddhist world from Burma to Japan.  The example of the Buddha, if we may believe the story, shows that he felt the importance of scenery and climate in the struggle before him and his followers still hold that a holy life is led most easily in beautiful and peaceful landscapes.

2

Hitherto we have found allusions to the events of the Buddha’s life rather than consecutive statements and narratives but for the next period, comprising his struggle for enlightenment, its attainment and the commencement of his career as a teacher, we have several accounts, both discourses put into his own mouth and narratives in the third person like the beginning of the Mahavagga.  It evidently was felt that this was the most interesting and critical period of his life and for it, as for the period immediately preceding his death, the Pitakas provide the elements of a biography.  The accounts vary as to the amount of detail and supernatural events which they contain, but though the simplest is perhaps the oldest, it does not follow that events consistent with it but only found in other versions are untrue.  One cannot argue that anyone recounting his spiritual experiences is bound to give a biographically complete picture.  He may recount only what is relevant to the purpose of his discourse.

Gotama’s ascetic life at Uruvela is known as the wrestling or struggle for truth.  The story, as he tells it in the Pitakas, gives no dates, but is impressive in its intensity and insistent iteration[318].  Fire, he thought to himself, cannot be produced from damp wood by friction, but it can from dry wood.  Even so must the body be purged of its humours to make it a fit receptacle for illumination and knowledge.  So he began a series of terrible fasts and sat “with set teeth and tongue pressed against the palate” until in this spiritual wrestling the sweat poured down from his arm pits.  Then he applied himself to meditation accompanied by complete cessation of breathing, and, as he persevered and went from stage to stage of this painful exercise, he heard the blood