Tribes in Ancient India c61.s2.42

c61.s2.42

We next come to the accounts of the city left by the Chinese travellers. Fā Hien, who visited Vaiśālī at the beginning of the fifth century A.D., i.e. about a thousand years after the Buddha’s time, says,⁴ ‘North of the city is a large forest, having in it the double-galleried vihāra where Buddha dwelt, and the tope over half the body of Ānanda.’ The double-galleried vihāra is evidently the Kūṭāgārasālā in the Mahāvana or ‘great forest’, which stretched right up to the Himalayas as Buddhaghosa explains in his *Sumaṅgalavilāsinī* to the Mahāli Sutta in the *Dīgha Nikāya*.⁵ With regard to the Kūṭāgārasālā Buddhaghosa says: ‘In that forest (i.e. Mahāvana) was established a *saṃghārāma* (monastery). A *pāsāda* (storeyed building) was built on pillars and putting a pinnacle above, it was made into a *kūṭāgārasālā* resembling a chariot of the gods (*devavimāna*). From it, the whole *saṃghārāma* is known as Kūṭāgārasālā.’⁶ This agrees with Fā-Hien’s description of the double-galleried vihāra. The upper storey was evidently built upon a large number of pillars instead of walls, and on the top there was a kūṭa or peak, so that there were two galleries, one below and the other above, and from the upper storey rose a pinnacle, as we see in the vimānas or rathas referred to by Buddhaghosa. Hsüan Tsang, who visited the city more than 200 years after Fā-Hien, found this great vihāra in ruins. He adds, ‘To the east of the tope of the Jātaka narrative was a wonder-working tope on the old foundations of the “two-storey Preaching Hall”,¹ in which Ju-lai delivered the P’u-men-t’o-lo-ni and other sūtras. Close to the remains of the Preaching Hall was the tope which contained the half-body relics of Ānanda.’² The story of the parinirvāṇa of Ānanda and the division of the remnants of the body has been told by Fā-Hien, and the same account is also given in the Tibetan works.³