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Whatever the motives of his conversion, we have it on the authority of Hiuen-Tsang that he ultimately did great things for Buddhism, and the magnificent stupa, which he erected outside his capital, five-and-twenty stories high and crowned with a cupola of diamonds, was still 150 feet high and measured a quarter of a mile in circumference when the Chinese pilgrim visited Purushpura five centuries later.
Many had been the revolutions of the wheel of time since Hiuen-Tsang had watched the circling of the vultures round the sacred peak some twelve and a half centuries before me, and as Buddha himself, another twelve and a half centuries earlier, must have watched them when he miraculously stretched forth his hand through a great rock to rescue his beloved disciple Ananda from the clutch of the demon Mara, who had taken on the shape of a vulture.
Hiuen-Tsang, who spent fifteen years in India during Harsha's reign, searching for the relics of early Buddhism in a land from which it was steadily disappearing, has given us a wonderful picture of a religious state-pageant which makes Prayaga, at the triple confluence of the Ganges and the Jumna with the sacred but invisible river, Saraswati, near to the modern city of Allahabad, stand out as another striking landmark in Indian history.
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