we owe most of our knowledge of Rajagriha described it—­“a solitary peak rising to a great height on which vultures make their abode.”  Many had been the revolutions of the wheel of time since Hiuen-Tsang had watched the circling of the vultures round the sacred peak some twelve and a half centuries before me, and as Buddha himself, another twelve and a half centuries earlier, must have watched them when he miraculously stretched forth his hand through a great rock to rescue his beloved disciple Ananda from the clutch of the demon Mara, who had taken on the shape of a vulture.  The swoop of those great birds seemed to invest the whole scene with a new and living reality.  Across the intervening centuries I could follow King Bimbisara, who reigned in those days at Rajagriha, proceeding along the causeway of rough, undressed stones, which can be traced to-day to the foot of the mountain and up its rocky flanks, after his men had “levelled the valley and spanned the precipices, and with the stones had made a staircase about ten paces wide,” so that he should himself be carried up to wait in his own royal person on the Lord Buddha.  There, marked to the present day by the remains of two large stupas, was the place where the king alighted from his litter to go forward on foot, and farther up again the spot where he dismissed his followers and went on alone to invite the Buddha to come down and dwell in his capital.

That must have been about 500 B.C., and Buddha spent thereafter a considerable portion of his time in the bamboo garden which King Bimbisara presented to him on the outskirts of Rajagriha.  There, and in his annual wanderings through the country, he delivered to the poor and to the rich, to the Brahman and to the sinner, to princes and peasants, to women as well as to men, his message of spiritual and social deliverance from the thraldom of the flesh and from the tyranny of caste.

With the actual doctrines of Buddhism I do not propose to deal.  There is nothing in them that could not be reconciled with those of the Vedanta, and they are especially closely akin to the Sankhya system.  But the driving force of Buddhism, as also of Jainism, which grew up at the same time as Buddhism under the inspiration of another great reformer, Mahavira, who is said to have been a cousin of King Bimbisara, was a spirit of revolt against Brahmanical Hinduism, and a new sense of social solidarity which appealed to all classes and castes, and to women as well as to men.  The Vedanta reserved the study of the scriptures to men of the three “twice-born” castes, and placed it under the supreme authority of the Brahmans.  Both Buddha and Mahavira recognised no such restrictions, though they did not refuse reverence to the Brahman as a man of special learning.  The religious orders which they founded were open to all, and these orders included nuns as well as monks.  This was the rock on which they split with Hinduism.  This was the social revolution that, in spite of the religious and philosophical elasticity of Hinduism, made Buddhists and Jains unpardonable heretics in the eyes of the Brahmans, and produced a conflict which was to last for centuries.