The Hosso sect traced itself back to the brothers Asangha and Vasubandhu, whom we may place at the beginning of the fourth century A.D. It was an age of syncretism and eclecticism. Mani, the founder of Manichaeism, had already worked out his great religion, which was destined to spread so widely and to have so extended and varied an influence, and Mani had laboured in India, as well as studied in Alexandria and Babylon. The Buddhists in India, hard pressed by the arguments of Hindu philosophers, such as the doughty Sankaracharya, were casting about for new ways of putting their principles before the Hindu world. The Dharmalakshana or Hosso teachings of Asangha and Vasubandhu were intended to build a bridge between Hinduism and the Mahayana, of such a nature that the Buddhist might, as it were, invade the territory of Hinduism and conquer without seeming to do so.

The teaching was based, as I have said, on a revelation or quasi-revelation. Whilst Asangha was lecturing in Ayodhya, the present Oude, in India, he received a heavenly visitor, the great Bodhisattva Maitreya, the disciple of S'akyamuni, who had received the promise of becoming the future Saviour of the world, and who was waiting in the celestial regions for the fulness of the times to come. Maitreya, appearing in the lecture hall, expounded for Asangha a secret and mysterious doctrine which he had been commissioned to deliver. He had come from a Buddha greater and wiser than S'akyamuni, from the great Buddha Loc'ana, or Roshana, whose colossal statue is now known as the Daibutsu of Nara, and who is not to be confounded with the Vairoc'ana of the Shingon sect, introduced later by the Kegon doctors and Kobodaishi;

[paragraph continues] Roshana, said Maitreya, was the Supreme Being, invisible but all-powerful. When He showed Himself upon earth, it was through the personality of two great spiritual Beings, Maitreya Himself, and Manjus'ri, the potent Bodhisattva of China.