Next to these perhaps the most celebrated teacher elevated to Bodhi-sattvaship was Nāgārjuna[92]—noticed before as the alleged founder of the Mahā-yāna system and its introducer into Tibet. According to one account he was the son of a Brāhman of Vidarbha, and taught Buddhism in the south of India. He had a celebrated disciple named Deva (or Ārya-deva)[93]. Nāgārjuna was at any rate a great teacher and developer of the Mahā-yāna. A legend relates that he was skilled in magic, and was able thereby to prolong his own and a Southern Indian king’s life indefinitely. This caused great grief to the mother of the Heir-apparent, who instigated her son to ask Nāgārjuna for his own head. Nāgārjuna complied with the request, and cut his own head off with a blade of Kuṡa grass, nothing else having the power to injure him. He is said by Hiouen Thsang to have lived in Southern Koṡala about 400 years after the death of Gautama, and is worshipped under different epithets in Tibet, China, Mongolia, and even Ceylon. Probably he lived in the first or second century—Beal places him between A.D. 166 and 200. Wassiljew considers him a wholly mythical personage. The additions he made to Buddhist doctrines were undoubtedly great. When he died Stūpas were erected to his memory, and in some places he was even worshipped as Buddha. Among other deified, or partially deified Bodhi-sattvas, whose images and Stūpas (p. 161) the Chinese pilgrims found scattered in various parts of India, may be mentioned, those of the mythical Buddhas who preceded Gautama, especially Kāṡyapa[94]. Then we have Rāhula (son of Gautama), the patron of all novices, and founder of the realistic school called Vaibhāshika[95]; Dharma-pāla, Vasu-mitra (or Vasu-bandhu), Aṡva-ghosha, Guṇamati, Sthiramati, and others. In this practice of deifying their saints, Buddhists merely followed the example of the adherents of Hindūism. And we may add that this tendency is constantly repeating itself in the religious history of all nations. There is even a tendency to press the saints of other countries into the service. This is remarkably exemplified in the history of Barlaam and Josaphat, current in Europe in the Middle Ages. The zealous Roman Catholics of those days thought that they could not exclude so noble a monk as Buddha from the catalogue of their own saints, and so they registered him in their list as St. Josaphat (Josaphat being a corruption of Bodhisat). Colonel Yule, in his Marco Polo, states that a church in Palermo is dedicated to this saint.