________________ Vaisah in Indian History and Culture 70 uttermost penance and austerity, of which Mabavira stood out as the most prominent example. When the Buddha renounced the world and became a monk, his first task naturally was the quest of the teacher which, according to the Upanisads, was the first step in religious life. As the Chandogya Upanisad states, a man blind.folded cannot even find his way home. He can arrive at the home of Truth when the bandage of his eyes is removed by the teacher, who restores to him his eye-sight or spiritual insight. His quest of the teacher led the unknown Buddha, the Bodhisattva, to proceed towards Vaisali as the place which was then known for its abundance of spiritual teachers. There Buddha found his teacher Alara Kalama, a native of Vaisili according to Mahavastu (II, 118). Alara was so advanced in meditation that sitting on the road, he did not hear or see even 500 carts rattling past him Mahaparinibbanasuttunta (IV, 35). Mrs. Rhys Davids has also recorded her conclusion that the Buddha found his first two teachers, Alara and Uddaka, at Vaisali and even started his religious life as a Jain under their teachings. A supports for the Buddba's Jain beginnings may be found in the fact that he gave himself up to a course of austerities associated with Jainism by which he reduced himself to a mere skeleton, skin and bones, by ultimately limiting his food to the quantity that could be held in his hollowed palm, in the manner of a good Jain like Mahavira. As is well known, his health was not equal to this extreme of mortification; then he parted company with Jainism and discoverd for himself the Middle-path, for which Buddhism is known, the path that lies between the two extremes of self-torture and self-indulgence. This early contact of Gautama, as an aspiring ascetic, with Vaisali is not so well known. But hs first visit to Vaisali, as the Buddha, has been fully described in the Texts with a touch of romance. The city was then under the scourge of a fearful epidemic of plague to which it could not find any antidote. Its Municipal Council then thought of a remedy, that it should have the city purged of its impurities and purified by the sacred feet of the Buddha treading its thoroughfares. It, accordingly, sent an invitation to the Buddha to pay a visit to the city and appointed its President, Tomara, as its representative to receive the Buddha. The Buddha was given a right royal rousing reception by a procession of elephants and charious, decked with gold, along the whole road from the Ganges to the city, a distance of nearly 50 miles, which was bedecked with flags, gailands, and embroidered cloth, and was watered and perfumed with showers of flowers and burning of incense, along its whole length as the Buddha passed by . .
