Next follows (iii) an invocation of Abraxas (A-ba-ra-ka-kia), the god of the Alexandrian Gnostics of the first century A.D., who is thus still worshipped in Japan. Abraxas is treated as the sum-total of the Universe, composed of atoms or particles of Earth, Water, Fire, Wind, Void, (see the interesting chapter on God or Atoms in Mr. Glover's masterly work on the Development of Religious Thought in the Roman Empire during the First Century A.D.). Next follows (iv) the invocation of Five Abstract Buddhas--Amogha, Vairocana, Mahamudra, Manipadma, Jalapravarta. These names, with the exception of the second, are practically unknown, but the same personages appear later on as the five Dhyani Buddhas (Gochi Nyorai) of Japan. Mahavairocana, Akshobya, Ratnasambhava, Amitabha and Sakyamuni. (It is well known that Manes held that God was unknowable, except through his Five Manifestations or Spirits, to whom corresponded the great religious teachers of Antiquity Zoroaster, Buddha, Jesus, Manes himself, and Moses.) This second list shows that Amitabha is one of the Five--shall we call them?--Manifestations of Abraxas, the Gnostic God. That he corresponds to God in Christ may be inferred from the analogy of Manichaeism.

Having thus invoked God, as the Shingon know him--the invisible Sum-total of the Atoms, manifested to men through his five personified attributes,--the celebrant goes on to invoke (v) Amitabha in particular, as the god that brings Immortality (The Sanskrit form in the Mantra is said to be amrita immortal), and (vi) Amitabha with his companions, Kwannon and Seishi, to come and meet the soul in its passage from this world to the next. But it is mainly Amitabha the 'conductor of souls' that is the object of worship, for the celebrant next invokes Jizo

and Fudo, (Kshitigarbha and Acaravijyaraja), the conductor of souls and the champion of the righteous, and it is not until these have been summoned to the aid of the worshippers that the celebrant at last raises his heart to the invocation of Vairocana the Great Buddha, who stands to the Shingon very much in the same position as that held by Amida in the Shinshu. I believe that we have in the Shingon and the Shinshu two distinct strains of Gnostic teaching, the one representing Alexandria and the schools of Basilides and Valentinus, the other, the heresy of the Elchesaites, and that the latter has, through Nestorian and other influences, gradually drawn nearer to Christian ideals of Faith. Other analogies will be found in the thirteen Buddhas whom the Shingon look upon as the guardians of the spirits of the dead, and the thirteen realms of the dead in Gnostic books (e.g. Pistis Sophia). Also between the baptism of the corpse as practised in Shingon, and the 'Sacrament of the Ineffable' of the Gnostics.

Footnotes

^71:* Jodo Seikun.