"Heaven" and "hell" are both embraced in yin-kien. The invisible world includes states of happiness as well as misery. This reminds us of Homer, where, in the eleventh Book of the Odyssey, he describes the interviews of Ulysses with many of the shades of the dead, including his own mother. The palace of Pluto and the abodes of the dead were regarded by Homer and his contemporaries as underground. Was not the notion of ti-yu, "earth's prison," taken to India from countries farther west? Egypt may have been the parent of the idea of a subterraneous prison of the dead. We find the notion in Egypt, in Greece, in Babylon, and in India; but it is not in the Vedas. It was either originated in India after the Vedic age, or it was then introduced from elsewhere. I prefer somewhat the hypothesis of Western origin, on account of the similarity of the view held of the future state as given in Buddhist books, with those found in the religious books of Western races.

We are beginning to find out how fruitful was the Greek mind, not only in inventing, but in communicating the knowledge of inventions. The traces of Greek influence are found in Hindoo architecture, in Hindoo astronomy, in Hindoo arithmetic, and in Hindoo philosophy. The Sanscrit writing is now admitted to be of Semitic origin. The Hindoo hells which are first found in the "Laws of Manu,"

of uncertain date, somewhere between B.C. 800 and B.C. 500, and then in the Buddhist books, and which are intimately connected with the metempsychosis, may have come from Western countries, and subsequently have been elaborated into the Hindoo shape, when the universe based on the metempsychosis was in course of construction by the Hindoo mind; at any rate when Chinese critics charge Christianity with borrowing "heaven and hell" from the Buddhists, we are right in pointing out that the Olympus of the Greek gods, and the Hades of Pluto (Poseidon), in Homer, are more ancient conceptions than the Buddhist hells and paradises; and that, whether it was from Egypt, from Babylon, or from some other source, the borrowing is on the whole more likely to have been the other way. Otherwise, why do the oldest Hindoo books say nothing of the "earth prisons" and the "palaces of the gods"?

Redemption.--Each Buddha and Bodhisattwa is a redeemer. I notice here Ti-tsang-wang p'u-sa. He is called Yeu-ming-kiau-chu, "Teacher of the unseen world." Full of benevolence and grace towards mankind, he opens a path for self-reformation and pardon of sins.