According to the more legendary version of the story, it is written that when the Blessed One, having attained the supreme wisdom, entered upon his ministry, after six years of meditation, and an asceticism which had almost starved his very life, he came with his disciples to Rajagriha, where he was visited by Bimbisara, King of Maghada. This king had had five wishes: (1) That a Buddha might appear during his reign; (2) that he might himself see him; (3) that he might learn the truth from him; (4) that he might understand it; (5) that he might follow his commandments. When the king saw the Buddha and listened to his preaching, he was converted with many of his people, and invited the Blessed One to come to his city, where he set a great feast before him. When the feast was over, the king solemnly poured water over the hands of the Blessed One, saying, “I give the Kalantakanivasa Veluvana to the Blessed One to dispose of as may please him.” And that is how it came to pass that a grove of bamboos was the first Vihara, or meeting-place of Buddha and his saints. Full of poetry and Indian mysticism are the legends and fairy tales which monkish superstition has woven round the life of the Buddha, doing him and his memory no good service thereby; for when truth is overgrown with fables, like some fair flower choked by weeds, it becomes lost to sight and strangled, and men begin to doubt whether, indeed, it had any existence. In this way some doctors have been led to deny that such a man as the Buddha ever lived upon earth; men of learning have spent much profound scholarship on proving that he was merely a sun-myth; others have explained him away as being in some sort an astronomical allegory. It would be as easy to explain away Napoleon Buonaparte—indeed, did not that cunning logician, Archbishop Whately, making fun out of his own science, prove irrefutably by rule of syllogism that no such man as Napoleon ever did or ever could have existed? That Buddha was a very real man, inspired by the highest ideals, is a fact which all advance in knowledge proves more and more conclusively. Facts cannot be swept away like cobwebs; indeed, cobwebs are facts, as every housewife knows, and though a besom may annihilate them, their rebirth remains a demonstrable truth. So it is with the Buddha. The travels of Fa Hsien and Hsüan Chwang, Chinese pilgrims, who in the fifth and seventh centuries of our era went to India to collect Buddhist books and study the dogmas and history of the religion, have been recorded with all the scrupulous care and minuteness peculiar to their nation, and show the veneration in which the sites and monuments sacred to the Buddhist story were still held in their day. Nor is that all.