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66 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
place on the banks of the river Nairanjana for practising asceticism.
I
At Uruvela he found the five Parivrajakas whom he had met at Rajagraha and who had brought news of peace. They too were practising asceticism.
The mendicants saw him there and approached him to take them with him. Gautama agreed.
Thereon they served him reverently, abiding as pupils under his orders, and were humble and compliant.
The austerities and self-mortification practised by Gautama were of the severest sort.
Sometimes he visited two but not more than seven houses a day and took at each only two but not more than seven morsels.
He lived on a single saucer of food a day, but not more than seven saucers.
Sometimes he had but one meal a day, or one every two days, and so on, upto once every seven days, or only once a fortnight, on a rigid scale of rationing.
As he advanced in the practice of asceticism his sole diet was herbs gathered green, or the grain of wild millets and paddy, or snippets hide, or waterplants, or the red powder round rice-grains within the husk or the discarded scum of rice on the boil, or the flour of oilseeds.
He lived on wild roots and fruit, or on windfalls only.
His raiment was of hemp or hempen mixture of cerements of rags from the dust-heap, of bark, of the black antelope’s pelt either whole or split down the middle, of grass, of strips of bark or wood, hair of men or animals woven into a blanket, or of owl’s wings.
He plucked out the hair of his head and the hair of his beard, never quitted the upright for the sitting posture, squatted and never rose up, moving only squatting.
After this wise, in diverse fashions, he lived to torment and to torture his body—to such a length in asceticism did he go.