Page:Sagas from the Far East; or, Kalmouk and Mongolian traditionary tales.djvu/354

330 seek out his former companions. At their first meeting they were so scandalized to see him look so well and hearty instead of emaciated by austerities that they refused to pay him any respect. But when he showed them that he had attained to the illumination of a Buddha they accepted his teaching and put themselves entirely under his guidance. The number of his disciples increased meantime amazingly. As they lived by alms they received the name of Bhixu as a term of reproach. Ere long we find him sending out sixty of them, whom he invested with a certain high dignity he called Arhat, to spread his teaching wherever they came. He himself wandered for nineteen years over the central and eastern districts of the country, teaching,—his agreeable presence and benevolence of manner, and, the legends say, the wonderful things he did, winning him numerous converts wherever he went. Some gave themselves up to a life of contemplation in the jungle, others associated themselves with him in his travels. When the rainy season set in they had to find shelter for the four months in such colleges of Brahmans or houses of families as they found well inclined towards them. This Varshavasana, as it was called, afforded them additional opportunity of making known their ideas.

Shâkjamuni himself seems to have won over several kings to his way of thinking; one of them, king of Pankâla, he made an Arhat; another, the king of Koshala, stirred himself very much to awaken Shuddodana to a sense of the merit of his son, sending to congratulate him because one of whom he was progenitor had found the means by which mortals might attain to unending happiness. For once, making an exception to the proverb that a prophet meets with little honour in his own country, fortune favoured him in this matter also, and his father, who violently opposed his withdrawal from his due mode of life in the first instance,