Zendo's biographers relate how, when the patriarch was on the way to visit Doshaku, his road lay through forests and mountains, so rough and impassable that, at last, worn out with fatigue, he had to lie down to rest in a cave. He was fainting with hunger and weariness, and it was two days before he could raise himself. Then it seemed to him that a voice sounded in his ears: "Pull yourself together, and struggle on: your difficulties will disappear." We may perhaps inquire what these difficulties were and how they disappeared.

Doshaku is said to have died in the year A.D. 637. The date cannot be implicitly trusted, for it is also said that Zendo was twenty-nine years old when he visited Doshaku and accepted Amidaism, an impossible age, if Zendo was born in A.D. 614. The explanation probably will be found in another statement to the effect that Doshaku died five years after the visit of Zendo. That would make Zendo twenty-three years old when he visited Doshaku, and we may easily believe that the conversion to Amidaism, as he came to learn it, may have been a slow process, not fully accomplished for several years. But, whichever way we look at it, the conversion of Zendo to the full faith in Amida must have taken place about the year A.D. 636 (if anything a little later than that year), and in, or near, the capital city of Singanfu. From that date, and in that city, he began his preaching activity.

China under the Tang dynasty had many dealings with Central Asia. The ruling family, as dukes of the dependent principality of Tang, had been much mixed up with Tartar and Turkish tribes, and it was apparently by their help that the family had been seated on the throne of China. From the moment, therefore, that the Dynasty was established, the new Empire became the cynosure of Central Asian eyes. A Persian mission was sent by Chosroes II. praying for an alliance, and in 621 the first Zoroastrian temple was erected in Singanfu. The leader of this mission seems to have been a Magian of the name of Holu ("le fils du feu," as P. Gaubil calls him), who was very active in stirring up China against the Mahometans. Of Manichaeans in China proper there seems to be no mention for many years to come, but in 636,

almost synchronizing with the commencement of Zendo's preaching activity, arrived the Nestorian mission under Olopen, which has left behind it an enduring memorial in stone. Is it possible that the "difficulties" with which Zendo was troubled, when he lay wearied in the cave on his way to Doshaku, were difficulties connected with the relations between the Buddhist Faith and the Faith which the Nestorians preached?

We can trace the development of Zendo's thought. Confused by the multiplexity of the popular Buddhism of his day, he turns to the scripture in which S'akyamuni is represented as comforting