On Yuan Chwang's Travels in India, 629–645 A.D. v2.c18.37

v2.c18.37

This is a Jātaka told in the Vinaya and other treatises, the three friends being the Buddha, Maudgalyayāna, and Śāriputra in former births.¹ But the story as told in the Buddhist books has no connection whatever with Benares, and the reader will observe that again Yuan-chuang does not state that the tope was at the place where the event commemorated occurred. The story is related at Śrāvastī, or on the way thither, and the scene is laid on the side of the Himavant. According to the Jātaka the bird was a partridge and the tree a banyan, but the Ta-chih-tu-lun, calls the bird a ka-pin-ja-lo, and represents the three friends as living under a peepul tree.²