So, in spite of the indignation of the five men who had followed him into the ascetic life, he determined to go back into the world and live for the good of others instead of sitting wrapped in his own thoughts. He believed that he had achieved the great good, and he realized the fact that his attitude was one of utter selfishness, barren of all result, and leading to nothing. The disappointment and the desertion of his five followers must have been bitter. But comfort came to him in time, for they grew to know that he was right and were converted as trusty disciples to his new creed. From the time that he left the shade of the Bodhi tree his ministration began. He knew that he had received the sublime gift of wisdom, and that the gift was not for himself alone, but for the purification and happiness of all mankind. It was no doubt a great struggle to give up the illusion of six long years and the dream of many more. But it was also a great triumph, the turning-point of a life that was so full of destiny. I have already told how the first Vihara was established in the Veluvana, the pious gift of King Bimbisara, but the chief home of the Buddha was another garden or grove called the Jétavana, which a certain minister named Anatha Pindaka had bought at a great price from Jéta, the son of the King of Sravasti. Here the Buddha dwelt for more than twenty years, and there he uttered the Jātakas, or Birth Stories, which have been preserved mainly thanks to his kinsman Ananda. For it is a strange coincidence that, as in Christianity so in Buddhism, there is no written word by the Master. These Jātakas are of the nature of parables by which the Buddha was wont to illustrate the events of the present by stories of what had taken place in a former state of existence; and as the Buddha’s life was one long struggle against the treacherous designs of his enemy Devadatta, so in the Jātakas we find a constant reference to the feud as having existed in previous incarnations. When first the Buddha began to preach, women were not admitted into the Holy Order; but there soon came a moment when they, too, yearned to listen to the teaching of the Master. A certain noble of the Shakya clan took his wife and a number of Shakya ladies to sit at the feet of the Blessed One. Among them it is to be inferred were Gopā and others of the Buddha’s wives. But Yasōdhara was not among the very first, for she still longed for her lost husband, and hoped against hope that he might yet come back to her. But when she saw that this could not be, she, too, was converted and became a saint, earning the praise of the Blessed One for her modesty and virtue.