Elephant stories are prevalent in the myths which cloud and hide the purer ideas of the Buddhist faith. Shortly before the birth of Buddha, his mother Queen Maia had a vision. The four kings of the world removed her to the Himalayan Forest, and there seated her on an immense rock. She was bathed, robed, and adorned by a number of queens, and was then led to a golden palace standing on a silver mountain, and requested to rest on a couch, with her face turned to the west. She did so, and beheld a golden mountain on which the future Buddha marched in the form of a white elephant. It descended the golden mountain, and bearing a white lotus flower in its trunk, and trumpeting loudly as it came, made its way to the couch of the astonished Queen Maia. The birth of Buddha was attended by a number of portents which betokened that a most distinguished person had appeared on earth. Either he was a Buddha or a universal emperor-- "A Chakravartin, such as rise to rule Once in each thousand years."[K] If he were the latter, he would possess "seven gifts", tokens of his future universal power. One of them was "... a snow white elephant, The Hasti-Katna, born to bear his King."[L] By the signs on his foot, which we have already described, he was known to be a Buddha. One of these signs is an elephant, named Chatthan. This is the three-headed elephant on which Indra rides, and is represented in many Siamese decorations, and in the royal coat of arms, but in all the sculptures which represent the sole of Buddha's foot, the elephant possesses only one head. There is also in Siamese story a king of elephants, Chatthan or Chaddanta, who lives on the shores of the lake Chatthan in the Himalayas. Here he resides in a golden palace, attended by eighty thousand ordinary elephants. The elephant Chatthan is sometimes known as "the elephant of six defences," an allusion to his possession of six tusks. When the great king Mara (who reigns over all the Mara angels, and corresponds in the Buddhist scriptures to the Satan of the Bible) came to tempt the Buddha as he sat under the Bo-tree, in the time when he attained the wisdom and holiness of Buddhahood, it is said that he came on an elephant. He assumed an immense size, and brandishing numerous weapons in his thousand arms, advanced to the tree, riding on his elephant Girimaga, which was no less than a thousand miles in height. A number of similar elephant stories could easily be compiled, for they are plentifully distributed in the legends of the East. Probably the great size and strength of the beast are the bases upon which the stories rest.