The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest, including the Invasion of Alexander the Great c10.27

c10.27

³ These heretics were seen by Fa-hien at Śrāvastī in or about A. D. 405. 'There are also companies of the followers of Devadatta still existing. They regularly make offerings to the three previous Buddhas, but not to Śākyamuni [*scil.* Gautama] Buddha' (*Travels*, ch. xxii, in Legge's version. All the versions agree as to the fact). In the seventh century Hiuen Tsang found three monasteries of Devadatta's sect in Karṇasuvarṇa, Bengal (Beal, *Records*, ii, 201 ; *Life*, p. 131). Detailed legends concerning Devadatta will be found in Rockhill's *Life of the Buddha* (see Index), and the disciplinary rules of his order on p. 87 of that work. The fact that Asoka twice repaired the *stūpa* of Kanakamuni, one of 'the previous Buddhas', proves that reverence for those saints was not incompatible with devotion to the teaching of their successor, Gautama (*Niglīva Pillar inscription*, in *Asoka, the Buddhist Emperor of India*, 3rd ed., p. 224). Very little is known about the teaching of ‘the previous Buddhas’. Three of them seem to have been real persons, namely Krakuchanda, Kanakamuni, and Kāśyapa.