^72:* I think we should remember that there are certain passages in the Old Testament which also give "anthropomorphic" descriptions of God which must evidently be taken in a figurative sense. It is interesting to compare Hippolytus, Philosophumena, Bk. ix. 462-3 (Ed. Migne), and to remember that the sect there described had its origin at the time at which, and in the locality from which, the mission started which brought the Amida Books to China.

^72:+ Cf. Col. i. 16. eikun toy theoy toy aoratoy.

^73:* These last phrases are ascribed to the Chinese Patriarch Zendo. If any of my readers will take the trouble to verify my statements by comparing them with the Japanese handbook from which I have summarized them, he will, I think, acknowledge that I have not exaggerated the similarity between the Shinshu conception of Amida and our notions of God. Dr. Haas, of Heidelberg, has pointed out to me in a recent letter that Zendo, whilst highly honoured by the Amidaists in China and Japan, never secured for any of his writings the distinction, accorded to many Chinese scholars of inferior merit, of a place in the Tripitaka Canon. He thinks it is possibly due to a suspicion in the minds of the compilers that Zendo's teaching contained in it elements that were not genuinely Buddhist. There is a phrase fushi sogo, "the turning of the hearts of father's and sons to each other." It is the title of a well-known Japanese treatise: but it is found in Zendo's Commentary on the Sukhavati Vyuha. Zendo was contemporary with the arrival of the Nestorian Mission to China. He flourished about A.D. 620.