Page:Footfalls of Indian History.djvu/310

Truly the city, even as she stands, is more ancient than any superficial critic would suppose. It was here at Sarnath, in the year 583 B.C. or there-abouts, that the great message pealed out whose echoes have never died away in history, "Open ye your ears, O Monks, the deliverance from death is found!" And the importance which the Deer-Park thus assumes in the life of Buddha, both before and after the attainment of Nirvana, sufficiently proves its importance as the university of philosophy of its own age. Three hundred years later Asoka, seeking to build memorials of all the most sacred events in the history of his great Master, was able, as the recent excavations show us, to make a tiny stupa with its rail in some cell, by that time already underground, whose site had been especially sanctified, by the touch of Buddha's feet. We thus learn, not only that the Deer-Park of Benares (so called, probably, because pains were taken to keep it cleared of larger game) was important in the year 583 B.C. and again in 350 B.C., but also that it was sufficiently a centre of resort throughout the intervening period to guarantee its maintenance of an unbroken tradition with regard to points of extremely minute detail. But it was not Sarnath alone that saw the coming and going of Buddha in the birth of the great enlightenment. Nor was it the Abkariyeh Kand alone that had already formed an important religious centre for ages before the early Mohammedan period. The very name of the Dasasvamedh Ghat