In a subsequent age, when the World-honored one had attained to perfect Wisdom and become Buddha, he said to his disciples, “This is the place where I in a former age laid down my bow and weapons.” [2] It was thus that subsequently men got to know the fact, and raised the tope on this spot, which in this way received its name.  The thousand little boys were the thousand Buddhas of this Bhadra-kalpa. [3]

It was by the side of the “Weapons-laid-down” tope that Buddha, having given up the idea of living longer, said to Ananda, “In three months from this I will attain to pari-nirvana”; and king Mara [4] had so fascinated and stupefied Ananda, that he was not able to ask Buddha to remain longer in this world.

Three or four li east from this place there is a tope commemorating the following occurrence:  A hundred years after the pari-nirvana of Buddha, some Bhikshus of Vaisali went wrong in the matter of the disciplinary rules in ten particulars, and appealed for their justification to what they said were the words of Buddha.  Hereupon the Arhats and Bhikshus observant of the rules, to the number in all of seven hundred monks, examined afresh and collated the collection of disciplinary books [5].  Subsequently men built at this place the tope in question, which is still existing.

[Footnote 1:  Ambapali, Amrapali, or Amradarika, “the guardian of the Amra (probably the mango) tree,” is famous in Buddhist annals.  She was a courtesan.  She had been in many narakas or hells, was one hundred thousand times a female beggar, and ten thousand times a prostitute; but maintaining perfect continence during the period of Kasyana Buddha, Sakyamuni’s predecessor, she had been born a devi, and finally appeared in earth under an Amra tree in Vaisali.  There again she fell into her old ways, and had a son by king Bimbisara; but she was won over by Buddha to virtue and chastity, renounced the world, and attained to the state of an Arhat.]

[Footnote 2:  Thus Sakyamuni had been one of the thousand little boys who floated in the box in the Ganges.  How long back the former age was we cannot tell.  I suppose the tope of the two fathers who became Pratyeka Buddhas had been built like the one commemorating the laying down of weapons after Buddha had told his disciples of the strange events in the past.]

[Footnote 3:  Bhadra-kalpa, “the Kalpa of worthies or sages.”  “This,” says Eitel, “is a designation for a Kalpa of stability, so-called because one thousand Buddhas appear in the course of it.  Our present period is a Bhadra-kalpa, and four Buddhas have already appeared.  It is to last two hundred and thirty-six millions of years, but over one hundred and fifty-one millions have already elapsed.”]

[Footnote 4:  “The king of demons.”  The name Mara is explained by “the murderer,” “the destroyer of virtue,” and similar appellations.  “He is,” says Eitel, “the personification of lust, the god of love, sin, and death, the arch-enemy of goodness, residing in the heaven Paranirmita Vasavartin on the top of the Kamadhatu.  He assumes different forms, especially monstrous ones, to tempt or frighten the saints, or sends his daughters, or inspires wicked men like Devadatta or the Nirgranthas to do his work.  He is often represented with 100 arms, and riding on an elephant.”]