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MAHAVAGGA.
Uruvelâ, on the bank of the river Nerañgarâ1, at the foot of the Bodhi tree (tree of wisdom), just after he had become Sambuddha. And the blessed Buddha sat cross-legged at the foot of the Bodhi tree uninterruptedly during seven days, enjoying the bliss of emancipation 2.
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I, I, I.
historians of the Buddhist ecclesiastical law, of different successive forms in which the ordination of Bhikkhus had been performed. In the beginning, of course, there was nobody but the Buddha himself who could ordain Bhikkhus; to him those who desired to be received, expressed their wish, and he conferred on them the pabbaggâ and upasampadâ ordinations by the formula: "Ehi bhikkhu,' &c. (see I, 6, 32, 34, &c.) It was a very natural conception that afterwards, as the Samgha grew larger, the Buddha should have transferred the power of admitting new members to the Bhikkhus themselves, and should have instituted that form of ordination which the redactors of the Pitaka found valid at their own time.
The transition, however, from the supposed oldest form of ordination (the so-called ehi-bhikkhu-upasampada) to that latter form is in the Vinaya legends not represented as immediate. There is described an intermediate stage between the two, the ordination by the three saranagamanas, or by the candidate's three times repeated declaration of his taking refuge in the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Samgha (see Mahâvagga I, 12). The reason which has led the redactors of the Vinaya Pitaka to this construction, was most probably the important part which in the upasampadâ service of the later time devolved upon the preceptor (upagghaya) of the candidate. As only learned Bhikkhus, who had completed the tenth year after their own upasampadâ, could perform the function of upagg hâya at the upasampada ordination of other Bhikkhus (Mahâvagga I, 31, 8), it was natural that the redactors of the Vinaya found it impossible to ascribe this form of upasampadâ service to the first times of Buddha's teaching. For these times, therefore, they recorded another form, the upasampadâ by the three saranagamanas, the introduction of which they assigned, very naturally, to the time soon after the conversion of Yasa's friends, by which event the number of Bhikkhus had been augmented at once from seven to sixty-one.
1 The Lilayan or Phalgu river in Behar; see General Cunningham's map, Archaeological Reports, vol. i. plate iii.
2 After having reached the sambodhi and before preaching to
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