CHAPTER VIII.

Amida Nyorai.

( section section, 37-41).

Momotose mo
Inoru kokoro no
Hakanasa yo,
Namu Amida Bu no
Muryoju naru ni.

"What a vain prayer it is, to ask for a hundred years of life, when Amida is yours, whose Life is Everlasting!"

It is said of one of the Chinese Patriarchs of the School of Faith that, before his eyes were opened, he went every where seeking for the Elixir of Life. The celebrated Bodhiruci met him. " You are seeking," he said to him, "for a medicine that shall ensure you a hundred years of life. I can point you to something better than that." And he preached to him Faith in the Buddha of Life Eternal. It must have been this incident that inspired the little poem which I have put at the head of this chapter.

In a little Handbook of Doctrine lately published by teachers of the Jodo Sect [**] and therefore identical in teaching with what the Shinshu hold, there is a

catena of passages from Sutras, as well as from later theological treatises, which bear upon Amida.

He is there described as a Being whose Length of Life is Immeasurable in Past, Present, and Future. He never had a beginning. He will never have an end, His life at this present moment fills everything. If we picture Him to ourselves, His form is such as the Japanese artists delight to paint,--colossal in stature, [**] with a face "as the sun shining in his strength,"--enko no kebutsu, [*+] the personified Buddha of Perfect Light. His Light is as immeasurable as His Life: it has had no beginning, it will have no end, it is as boundless in space as it is in time. It illuminates the Ten Quarters (jippo), which is the Buddhist equivalent for the Universe, and there is no place which it is does not reach. Wherever He is, He is king, and the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas of Ten Quarters are "the Angels of His that do Him service," there is none that rendereth Him not homage.

Yet, though the Universe is not large enough to contain Him, he has a-local habitation where He may be seen by the eye of faith. He is gokuraku no aruji, "The Lord of the Paradise," and it is in Paradise that He is especially able to display His

[paragraph continues] Attribute of Mercy. Other Buddhas and Bodhisattvas may abandon a sinner in sheer despair of procuring for him a saving conversion; but Amida never despairs. A dying thief, a lower and more miserable creature, if such there be,--would be welcome in Paradise, in the place where the deadly sins (go shu no aku) can find no entrance, where the eightfold work of salvation (hachi-gedatsu) bears its perfect fruit, and where the threefold light (san-myo) of Wisdom, Compassion, and Might, is constantly shining.