^16:4 On this point the Japanese Buddhists with few exceptions are very clear. They place the Sutras in which S'akyamuni spoke of Amitabha in that period of silence towards the end of his ministerial life when we lose our track of him, and can no longer follow him from year to year. The doctrine thus proclaimed was taken with the seceders after the Second Council beyond the Himalayas (some say to south India). It reappears after many years, in the country to which it had been taken, in the lifetime of Nagarjuna, and when the Kushan conquests had united North-West India and the Central Asian lands for a short while under one sceptre. The history of the Amitabha doctrine is well worked out in the "Shoshinge Kowa," to which I have already alluded. Amitabha is the original Buddha, the First Cause, the Father, not exactly the Creator, but the originator of the Law of Cause and Effect through which the universe came into existence. He has revealed himself many times, the long list of previous Buddhas in the Sukhavati Vyuha being recorded to give definiteness to this idea, and S'akyamuni was the latest of these manifestations. The Ophite Gnostics held exactly this idea, making Christ a still later manifestation superseding all that had gone before, just as Amitabha supersedes all other previous Buddhas. In connection with the questions thus raised, a Japanese scholar, much interested in religion, has pointed out to me that in some early forms of the Apostle's Creed there is no clause "Creator of heaven and earth." I shall have to refer to the character used for writing "Buddha" later on. Here I would point out that Buddha to the Shinshu believer is always Amitabha, whose "Divine Name" is pronounced in worship as Namu Amida Butsu. This formula is interpreted to mean, "Trust in me, I will save you," which is not a translation of the formula, but is one of the Name of Christ. The Shinshuists call this formula "the Divine Name of the Six Letters," for which see Irenaeus, ii. 24.