mitted to the Order, while in the same year he is said to have performed miracles at Sravasti, and to have gone to heaven to teach the Law to his mother, who had died seven days after his birth.
In the twelfth year of his ministry Buddha undertook the longest journey he had ever made, going to Mantala and returning by Benares, and then preaching the famous Maha Rahula Sutta to his son Rahula, then eighteen years old. Two years after, Rahula, being twenty, was formally admitted into the Order, and the Rahula Sutta was preached.
In the fifteenth year from the date of his proclaiming his creed, he again visited Kapilavastu, and addressed a discourse to his cousin Mahanama, who had followed Bhadraka, the successor of Suddhodana, as the king of the Sakyas.
In the seventeenth year he delivered a discourse on the death of Srimati, a courtesan; in the next year he comforted a weaver who had accidentally killed his daughter; in the following year he released a deer caught in a snare and converted the angry hunter who had wished to shoot him; and in the twentieth year he converted the famous robber Angulimala of the Chaliya forest.
For twenty-five years more Gautama wandered through the Ganges valley, preaching benevolence and holiness to the poor and humble, making converts among the high and the low, the rich and the poor, and proclaiming his law throughout the length and breadth of the land. He was now eighty years of age.
