Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c7.t1.3

c7.t1.3

The culture fostered in the north-west, and with it these thoughts, following the course of the Ganges, flowed on to the south-east through those powerful veins in which from of old beat most strongly the life of India. Among new peoples they assumed new forms, and when Buddha himself at last appeared, the two greatest kingdoms in the south-eastern half of the Gangetic valley, the lands of Kosala (Oude) and Magadha (Bihar), became the chief scenes of his teaching and labours. Thus there lie broad strips of land between the tracts in which, long before Buddha, Buddhism began its preparatory course of development, and those in which Buddha himself gathered round him his first believers; and this change of scenery and actors has had, it could not have been otherwise, an appreciable effect in more than one respect on the course of the play.