(ii) The Shingon Patriarchs, Vajrabodhi, Amoghavajra, etc., reached China, via the sea-route, during the sixth and seventh centuries. They came from South India and Ceylon, in both of which places there were Egyptian colonies.

(iii) I have already in a previous chapter given many instances showing the close connection between Egyptian Gnosticism and the Shingon. I will now give another.

In the commentary to the last verse of Namu Daishi, the writer says that the Shingon is different from other forms of Buddhism. It has had no great changes, no violent reformations, no developments. Its doctrine has been handed down from generation to generation of the faithful by the transmission of what is called the "Seal of Vairoc'ana." The "Seal of Vairoc'ana" is said to be the secret meaning of the letter A in the Sanskrit alphabet. A-ji, as it is called, is a very sacred thing to a Shingonist. "The paths which must be trodden in visiting the buildings of Koya San," say Satow and Hawes (l.c.), "together form the Sanskrit letter A, which is regarded as the symbol of the Taizokai" (i.e. the Diamond World, or World of Ideas, of which Vairoc'ana is the centre and the life). In "Pistis Sophia" (Schmidt's edition, p. 81) there is a note given by a later hand. According to this, the Seal of the Undying One (athanatos, in Shingon, Amida is always amrita) is aaa. He that sitteth on the throne (i.e. Christ the "First Mystery") is aaa; the interpretation of the whole Name of God is aaaa, aaaa, aaaa. O men prutos oyranos ftheggetai to A, says Irenaeus of the Gnostic Marcus (Iren., lib. i. cap. xiv. 7). The Gnostics, it is well known, stole the Christ of the Christians. The Shingon, possibly without knowing it, have been for centuries the receivers of stolen goods.

Dr. C. U. Pope, in a paper on the "Study of South Indian Vernaculars," in J.R.A.S for April, 1885, quotes a distich from Tiruvalluvar, the pariah weaver, which runs thus--

"A as its first of letters every speech maintains;
The Primal Deity is first through all the world's domains."

[paragraph continues] Tiruvallavar came from Mailapur in South India, where stands the Manichaean shrine of St. Thomas. It was from South India that Kobo's Shingon came with its stress on A-ji. The Tamil poet's date is between A.D. 1000 and 1200. Dr. Pope speaks of it as the "Oriental book which more than any other in the wide range of Eastern literature seems to reflect the moral teaching of the Great Master whom all the Western world reveres."