Ancient Indian Education (Brahmanical and Buddhist) c30.66

c30.66

**Vaiśālī.** In the Vaiśālī country there were some hundreds of Buddhist establishments, all of which, except three or four, were in ruins and deserted. In the neighbourhood of the capital was a monastery with a few monks of the Sammatiya school (p. 63). "It must have been distressing for our pilgrim to go over the waste jungle-covered ruins of a district which he had known from the Buddhist scriptures to have been once very flourishing" (p. 77). He comes to the Śvetapura Monastery in the neighbourhood, "having sunny terraces and bright-coloured halls of two storeys," where the brethren "were strict in their lives" and Mahāyānists (p. 79). The *Life* tells us that here the pilgrim obtained a copy of the Mahāyāna treatise, Bodhisattva-piṭaka (p. 80).