Page:The Garden of India.djvu/73

62 CHAPTER III.

EARLY OUDH HISTORY AND LEGEND. Ra'ma and Buddha — these are the two names, the two figures, which still stand prominently forth amid the mass of indistinct conce^jtions which are all that we can now form of ancient Oudh.

The former can be for us little moi-e than a name, though he still lives in the hearts and on the lips of millions of Hindus, who revere his memory as the son of Das;iratha, the bender of the magic bow, the wooer of Sita, the patient exile, the loving and beloved brother of the faith- ful Bhiirata, the triumphant slayer of the demon Ravana, the ideal type of the heroic king who ruled long and glori- ously in Ajodhya the blessed, thousands of years ago. Ajodhya, the capital of the kingdom of Kosiila, was founded, according to tradition, by Manu, the father of the human race, ascriptive author of the code that bears his name, and first of the line of Surajbans, or Sun-begotten kings, of whom Rama was the fifty-seventh in descent. The pros- perity of the city has waxed and waned with the changing fortunes of the Hindu faith, and when, on the fall of the last of the line of Rama, it became a desert, the royal kinsmen went forth into distant lands, and from them the