Notwithstanding Hiouen Thsang’s description of various Stūpas, monasteries and monuments seen by him, General Sir A. Cunningham was not able to identify any of the existing ruins in the neighbourhood of Kanouj, ‘so completely has almost every trace of Hindū occupation been obliterated by the Musalmāns’ (Report, i. 284). Fā-hien mentions a Stūpa near the town, built on the spot where the Buddha preached a discourse on ‘the bitterness and vanity of life,’ comparing it to ‘a bubble or foam on water’ (Legge, 54). _Pāṭali-putra._ Pāṭali-putra (now Patnā) seems to have existed as a village at a very early period. Its ancient name was Kusuma-pura. It was enlarged and practically founded about the time of the Buddha’s death by Ajāta-ṡatru[219], who did not, however, remove there from his own capital city Rāja-gṛiha. One of his successors, the great King Aṡoka, the well-known patron of Buddhism (p. 66), converted Pāṭali-putra into the metropolis of the kingdom of Magadha, and it thenceforward became an important centre of Buddhism. Sir A. Cunningham states that it continued flourishing as the capital of the great Gupta kingdom during the fourth and fifth centuries of the Christian era. Fā-hien relates a tradition that King Aṡoka’s palace in the city was built by genii (spirits), who brought great rocks and constructed chambers by heaping them together. He describes a monastery belonging to the Great Vehicle, and a temple belonging to the Little Vehicle, in the neighbourhood of the city, and gives an account of a Buddhist procession of four-wheeled cars and images which took place once a year. Each car was twenty-two feet or more high, and had five stories, with niches on four sides, in which were placed images of the Buddha and the Bodhi-sattvas, along with images of the gods (dēvas). They were made to look like moving pagodas (or Dāgabas). The Hindūs, as we know, have similar car-processions to this day, when the images of Kṛishṇa are dragged through the streets of towns and villages. Fā-hien mentions the interesting fact that the nobles of the country had founded hospitals in the city to which destitute, crippled, and diseased persons might repair, and receive advice, food, and medicines suited to their cases, gratuitously. He adds that Aṡoka, wishing to build 84,000 Stūpas[220] in place of the eight originally constructed over the Buddha’s ashes, built the first Stūpa and a pillar near Pāṭali-putra. Near it he says was an impression of the Buddha’s foot, over which a temple with a door towards the north had been erected (Legge, pp. 77-80; Beal, i. lv-lviii). The position of the Stūpa and column has been discovered by Sir A. Cunningham (xi. 157, 158). _Kesarīya._