148 A PILGRIMAGE FOR PEACE
In that inhospitable soil. It is little realized that for over
one thousand years, the flower of Buddhism flourished in
these parts in ail its pristine glory. The whole of the
Swat and the Kabul river valleys and the region beyond
and across Afghanistan right to Khotan, is strewn thick
with the remains of stupas, monasteries and pillars, and
Buddhist relics that tell their own tale. It was by way
of Taxila and Gandahar that Northern Buddhism spread to
China. And when the present-day Khudai Khidmatgar
signs the pledge of * non-violence in thought, word and
deed, he is only following in the footsteps of his forbears
who meditated over the meaning of 3?^i%?r fe^ ^9J£
(Let a man conquer anger with non-anger) in the cloister-
ed peace of the ancient university town of Takshashila in
the company of the Chinese pilgrim students who flocked
there across the Gobi desert.
Thanks to the labours of Sir John Marshall and the
amateur archaelogists like Crancroft, Delmerick and Cun-
ningham before him, we can take a leap across the cen-
turies and with a little imagination resurrect to ourselves
in all its vivid and colourful detail this most fascinating
page in the history of the Frontier Province. Twenty miles
north-west of Rawalpindi and immediately to the east
and north-east of the railway junction of Taxila are
the three distinct cities, the remains of ancient Taksha-
shila as it was rebuilt and shifted from place to place in
the course of time. There is a mention of Takshashila
in the Mahabharata in connection with the serpent sacri-
fice of Janamejaya. Arrian has referred to it as a great
and flourishing university town — " the greatest indeed
of all the cities which lay between the Indus and the
Hydaspes (Jhelum) and famous at that time, and during
the centuries immediately following, for its arts and
sciences of the day,"
In addition to these three city sites there are a num-
ber of detached monuments, mainly Biiddhist stupas and
monasteries, scattered over the face of the country. Of
these Gandhiji visited the remains of the Buddhist monas-
tery at Jaulian. Perched on the top of a hill 300 feet