that all his words and deeds were disowned by the order.  Then Devadatta incited the Crown Prince to murder his father, Bimbisara.  The plot was prevented by the ministers but the king told Ajatasattu that if he wanted the kingdom he could have it and abdicated.  But his unnatural son put him to death all the same[363] by starving him slowly in confinement.  With the assistance of Ajatasattu, Devadatta then tried to compass the death of the Buddha.  First he hired assassins, but they were converted as soon as they approached the sacred presence.  Then he rolled down a rock from the Vulture’s peak with the intention of crushing the Buddha, but the mountain itself interfered to stop the sacrilege and only a splinter scratched the Lord’s foot.  Then he arranged for a mad elephant to be let loose in the road at the time of collecting alms, but the Buddha calmed the furious beast.  It is perhaps by some error of arrangement that after committing such unpardonable crimes Devadatta is represented as still a member of the order and endeavouring to provoke a schism by asking for stricter rules.  The attempt failed and according to later legends he died on the spot, but the Vinaya merely says that hot blood gushed from his mouth.

That there are historical elements in this story is shown by the narrative of Fa Hsien, the Chinese pilgrim who travelled in India about 400 A.D.  He tells us that the followers of Devadatta still existed in Kosala and revered the three previous Buddhas but refused to recognize Gotama.  This is interesting, for it seems to show that it was possible to accept Gotama’s doctrine, or the greater part of it, as something independent of his personality and an inheritance from earlier teachers.

The Udana and Jataka relate another plot without specifying the year.  Some heretics induced a nun called Sundari to pretend she was the Buddha’s concubine and hired assassins to murder her.  They then accused the Bhikkhus of killing her to conceal their master’s sin, but the real assassins got drunk with the money they had received and revealed the conspiracy in their cups.

But these are isolated cases.  As a whole the Buddha’s long career was marked by a peace and friendliness which are surprising if we consider what innovations his teaching contained.  Though in contending that priestly ceremonies were useless he refrained from neither direct condemnation nor satire, yet he is not represented as actively attacking[364] them and we may doubt if he forbade his lay disciples to take part in rites and sacrifices as a modern missionary might do.  We find him sitting by the sacred fire of a Brahman[365] and discoursing, but not denouncing the worship carried on in the place.  When he converted Siha[366], the general of the Licchavis, who had been a Jain, he bade him continue to give food and gifts as before to the Jain monks who frequented his house—­an instance of toleration in a proselytizing teacher which is perhaps without parallel.