^265:1 These Sutras are known in Sanskrit as the greater and Lesser Sukhuvati Vyuha, and the Amitayur-dhyani Sutra, the two former extant both in Sanskrit and Chinese, the last in Chinese only. All three claim to be Sutras spoken by the Buddha himself, but no trace of them can be found prior to A.D. 147, when Anshikao and his associates took one of them to China--not from India, but from Central Asia--nor is there any written evidence of a belief in Amida before the times of As'vaghosha and Nagarjuna, say about the latter end of the first century A.D. Shortly after commencing this chapter I had an interview with a Buddhist priest, now deceased, whose conversation on this subject was extremely interesting. According to him, no Buddhist Sutras, whether Mahayana or Hinayana, were reduced to writing for the first five centuries after Buddha's death. (There is some support for this view in Singhalese tradition, though it does not quite agree with the evidence of As'oka's inscriptions.) From the beginning of the sixth Buddhist century began the writing down of the various Sutras, which had till then been traditional only. Oral tradition is, however, extremely liable to corruption and change, and thus there had arisen discrepancies, between North and South in general, and between different parts of the North in particular. In this way, he said, had been framed the two Vehicles; but it could not be affirmed that either of them was older than the other. The literary forms in which both Vehicles are enshrined are coeval, and both are late, as late as the Christian era. No Christian controversialist could ask for more generous concessions than these.

It may be of interest to some of my readers to know that since the end of 1910, I have been engaged, together with some Buddhist friends in Tokyo, on a work of translation of early Buddhist documents which may lead to some interesting developments. Our present immediate objective is to work out a translation into some European language of all the Indian books translated into Chinese during the Han period, i.e. A.D. 147 and A.D. 220. When these have been translated (it will take several years to accomplish), we hope that we shall be able to give to the world a tolerably complete picture of what Buddhism was like when first introduced into China. We also hope that we may be able to throw some light on Gnosticism and the developments of Christian heresy during the second and third centuries.