The gloom of the interior was thus available to the priests for
the production of effects which may be imagined."
Emerging from the temple, we saw the Buddhist monastery (_Vihara_),
which is a series of halls and cells rising one above the other in
stories connected by flights of steps, all hewn in the face of the
hill at the side of the temple. We sat down on a fragment of rock near
a stream of water with which a spring in the hillside fills a little
pool at the entrance of the Vihara. "Tell me something of Gotama
Buddha," I said. "Recite some of his deliverances, O Bhima
Gandharva!--you who know everything."
"I will recite to you from the _Sutta Nipata_, which is supposed by
many pundits of Ceylon to contain several of the oldest examples of
the Pali language. It professes to give the conversation of Buddha,
who died five hundred and forty-three years before Christ lived on
earth; and these utterances are believed by scholars to have been
brought together at least more than two hundred years before the
Christian era. The _Mahamangala Sutta_, of the _Nipata Sutta_, says,
for example: 'Thus it was heard by me.
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