rossing the expansive Ganga River with its sandy islands, we come to Vaishali, where the Buddha met the courtesan Amrapali and accepted a meal at her mango grove. She then gave the grove to the Buddha. It was also here that he overturned his earlier decision not to admit women and welcomed about fifty nuns into the sangha, led by his stepmother, Queen Maha Prajapati Gautami. A hundred years after his death, the second Buddhist council was held in Vaishali, and much later—in 1958—archeologists found here the remains of a stupa that housed relics of the Buddha. They are now at the museum in nearby Patna.