The Pilgrim Kamanita

I

The Lord Buddha Revisits the City of the Five Hills

“Thus have I heard: That the time came when the earthly sojourn of the Lord Buddha should be ended, and journeying from place to plate in the land of Magadha, he came to Rajagriha.”

Thus the Holy Buddhist Sutra of ancient India.

As the Master drew near to the City of the Five Hills, day was almost over, and the mildly beneficent rays of the evening sun lay along the green rice-fields and meadows of the far-reaching plain as if they were emanations from a divine hand extended in blessing. Here and there little billowy clouds—of purest gold dust as it seemed—rolled and crept along the ground, showing that men and oxen were plodding wearily homeward from their labour in the fields; and the lengthening shadows cast by isolated groups of trees were bordered by a halo, radiant with all the colours of the rainbow. Framed in a wreath of blossoming gardens, the embattled gateways, terraces, cupolas, and towers of the capital shone forth, delicately clear as in some fairy vision; and a long line of rocky eminences, rivalling in colour the topaz, the amethyst, and the opal, were resolved into an enamel of incomparable beauty.

Deeply moved, the Lord Buddha stayed his steps. Joy welled up within him, and his heart leaped forth to greet those familiar forms, bound up for him with so many memories: the Grey Horn, the Broad Vale, the Scer’s Crag, the Vulture’s Crest—“whose noble summit towers, roof-like, over all the rest”—and, above all, Vibhara, the Mountain of the Hot Springs, under whose shadow, in the cave beneath the Sattapanni tree, the homeless wanderer had found his first home, his first resting-place on the final journey from Sansara to Nirvana.