Another fact, about which all the writers are agreed who have written about the Mongolian Court under the three or four immediate successors of Genghis Khan, is that, in addition to priests and monks of the various religions, there was a considerable number of lay persons from many countries. We find mention of Frenchmen, Italians, Englishmen, serving the Mongols in various capacities. Koreans were there, and Chinamen. It seems hard to suppose that there were no Japanese. It was still the practice of Japanese in those days to cross to China for purposes of study and research, and the Mongols, living as they did on the northern frontiers of the Celestial Empire, were looked upon as half Chinese, long before Kublai made

himself Emperor of China on the overthrow of the Sung dynasty. There does not seem to have lurked in the Japanese mind any suspicion as to Mongol designs until Nichiren's writings and preachings forced the authorities to be on their guard against the danger.

If, therefore, we put all these considerations together, we shall see that it is far from impossible that some of Abbot Joachim's speculations may have been derived from the same sources which furnished the religious writers of Japan with the materials for their speculations, though through a different channel. There is a law of action and re-action in the world of ideas as well as in more material spheres.

D'Ohsson (op. cit., vol. ii. p. 265) tells us in a note that the Mongols called the Christians Arcaoun or Arkhaioun. I have not been able to identify this word absolutely in the only Mongolian Dictionaries accessible to me; but I venture to conjecture that it is the same word as the Sanskrit Arhat, which appears in ordinary Japanese as Rakan, but which Nichiren seems consistently to have written as Arakan. It is quite probable that the Christianity of the Nestorians may have appeared to the Mongolians as merely a variant form of Buddhism; for the Buddhism of Central Asia and China embraced in its wide bosom a very varied assortment

of heterogeneous elements. Nichiren knew of the Shatparamita Sutra, referred to in a former chapter, which was produced by the collaboration of the Nestorian priest Adam with the Indian Buddhist Prajna, and he rejected it with scorn. Two centuries later, when St. Francis Xavier landed in Kyushu and desired to preach the Faith of Christ, he received from the local Daimyo a written permit authorizing him to preach the doctrines of Buddha. It did not at first occur to the average Japanese mind that the Faith which the Jesuit Fathers had come to preach was anything more than a new variety of the multiplex Mahayana.