I will leave it to my readers to imagine what must have been the effect of a teaching which made the enlightenment of the mind a secondary matter, which laid its principal stress on magic formulae and incantations, and which encouraged its believers to expect, during this life, a position equal to that of the Almighty.

And yet Kobo Daishi was very far from being a bad man. We can look upon him with admiration, we can read most of his books with reverence, only, alas! we cannot help being reminded, as we read, of a Being who is sometimes "transformed into an Angel of Light." And when we look at the degradation of Japan during the Heian period, at the worldliness of the Buddhist clergy, at the trained fighting men of the Hieizan monastery, at the powerlessness of the sovereigns, at the robber bands which infested the capital at the very time when the artistic luxury of the court was at its height, at the Imperial palace burnt to the ground four times in the course of one short reign, at the sale of governorships, etc., for the purpose of raising money for Buddhist temples, at the

miseries of the people, and at the piteous spectacle of the Odorinembutsu as a remedy for those miseries, we shall be inclined to think that, in Japan also, we have come across some of his traces.

Footnotes

^225:1 Heian is the old name for Kyoto. Kyoto, which is even now the sacred city of Japanese Buddhism, was built in 794 by Kwammu Tenno, as his capital. Its name Heian signifies "Peace."

^226:1 It is a significant fact that the Buddhist rite of Baptism (Abhis'ekha, Jap. Kwanjo) comes into prominence just at the period when Buddhism and Nestorianism came into contact. The same may be said of the care devoted by Buddhists at this period to the details of Ordination. Shomu's reign actually saw the Nestorian Christian--the physician named Rimitsu--at the Nara Court. He was evidently honoured, for he was granted official rank along with a Chinaman named Ritsho, who became naturalized and took the name of Kiyomaru (Murdoch). Kiyomaru became the head of the university. It seems probable that Rimitsu was in charge of the hospital in which the Empress Komyo is said to have worked as a nurse during the smallpox epidemic. A few years later we find a Nestorian priest, Adam, collaborating with a Buddhist priest, Prajna, on the translation of a Persian () or possibly Uigur text of a treatise on the Cardinal Virtues. This can hardly have been a Buddhist book, though the Cardinal Virtues must be much the same in all religions. The treatise known as "Shat paramita sutra" appears in Nanjo's Catalogue as being the work of Prajna alone. Prajna was a follower of Zendo's, and there seems very little doubt that Zendoists and Nestorians were supposed to belong to the same ship.