Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c11.s2.19

c11.s2.19

To the question of the position of the Sakya kingdom and of the town of Kapilavatthu we need not return in detail after what has been said above, p. 92, 25 seq. That Kapilavatthu itself lay immediately on or in the Himalaya cannot be admitted in face of the silence which Fa Hian and Hiouen Thsang observed as to the mountain in their descriptions of the town. True, it is said in the Pabbajjâsutta regarding the Sakyas (“ Sutta Nipâta,” cf. Fausböll’s Trans., p. 68): ujum janapado . . . Himavantassa passato; but this warrants a conclusion as to the situation at the Himalaya of the territory only of the Sakyas, not of their capital. That Kapilavatthu, if it did not lie in the mountain, may not even have lain in the girdle of damp hollows (the so-called Tarai) which surrounds the southern margin of the mountain, that it must thus have lain south of the Tarai, cannot be alleged with certainty. The condition of the land and air has not been here at all times the same; in tracts of the Nepalese tarai, where now malaria prevails and only tiger and wild boar live, are to be found the splendid ruins of great ancient cities (Hodgson in the “ Journ. As. Soc.,” Bengal, 1835, p. 121 seq.).