Manichaeism may most properly be described as the completion of the Gnostic systems. It seems to have swept them all together, and to have joined them into one cohesive whole. We hear no more of Gnosticism after the rise of Manichaeism. It was not a Christian religion, yet it had its Christian side. It could speak to Christians in Christian language, and it made claim for Manes that he was the Paraclete, the Comforter whom Christ had promised. We have but to read the Anti-Manichaean treatises of St. Augustine, or any of the notices of Manichaeism in the Greek or Latin Fathers, to understand that Manes could talk, when he pleased, as a Christian. But he faced many ways, and in China the Manichaean clergy rather seem to have aimed at identifying themselves with the Buddhists.

Manichaeism did not, like Christianity, "present itself to man as a power to save him by cleansing his heart from sin; but, like Gnosticism, it simply proposed to

gratify man's craving for knowledge by explaining the very problem of his existence." It had a phrase in China which well sums up its principal teaching--a word pronounced in Japanese as Dai-un-Komyo, "the Light on the Great Cloud." It recognized two elements--the Light and the Cloud; and the Light, which is all good, is God. The personality of God comprises five spiritual and five material sub-elements, a division clearly corresponding to the five Dhyani Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. "But God is not alone in the light: His fulness comprehends an air of light, an earth of light, and numberless glories and magnificences. Upwards and sidewise this realm of light is unbounded; but from below it is met by the realm of darkness, the Cloud." Thus "Light resting on the Great Cloud" becomes the symbol of the Manichaean system. The term is found in China and Japan, often as a name for temples. I believe that in every case it can be traced back to a Manichaean origin or connection.

The ethical system of Manichaeism is more clearly allied with Buddhism. Whether Manes, coming to India, found the Dharmagupta system at work and incorporated it into his own, or whether the later Vinayists borrowed from the Manichaeans, I cannot tell. It all depends on the date to be assigned to books like the Brahmajala Sutra. But there is no doubt that the "Perfect" of the Manichaean system are remarkably like the candidates for Buddhaship who take upon themselves the 250 Rules of the Bodhisattva. In both systems there is the same threefold arrangement of sins according as they concern the hand, the mouth, or the heart. In both there is the same prohibition of marriage, and of every sort of sensual pleasure; Bodhisattvas and "Perfect" are alike forbidden