In Japan, the Shingon creed fills up the Mandara or pleroma of the Diamond World with many Aeons, whom it calls sometimes Buddhas, sometimes Bodhisattvas, and sometimes Myo-O, or "mysterious kings." As a term for the whole it employs two words, Abarakakia and Kha-la-ka-ba-a. The one is used in the Shingon funeral rites, where it is invoked first, before any invocation of personified Buddhas. The second is written in Sanskrit characters on the wooden post which is erected over a Buddhist grave immediately after the funeral. Both words are found in Gnosticism--Abraxas and Caulaucau; both are identical in meaning, both with one another and with the corresponding words in Japanese. I shall have to mention Caulaucau again in this chapter.

We now come to the Womb-world--as the Japanese call it--the World of moving Life, of Darkness, and of

[paragraph continues] Death. (It is worth while noticing that the expression "womb-world" is not confined to the Japanese Shingon. It is also found in Epiphanius in his description of the Basilidean conception of the World of Darkness. ) In the centre of the Womb-world we have, in the ancient Egyptian religion, Osiris; in the Gnostic system, the Pater Innatus; in Shingon, Vairoc'ana or Dainichi. All three systems identify this central Deity with the Sun. From Him, in all three systems, emanates an "ogdoad," or eight-petalled flower, known in Sanskrit as ashtapattra vriti, in Japanese as hachi-yo-in, and composed in Gnosticism of various Aeons, in Shingon of Eight Ideal Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, whose names we need not enter into. Thus the Ogdoad plus the Pater Innatus becomes an Ennead, or group of Nine, and the Shingon hachi-yo-in plus Vairoc'ana becomes a similar ninefold constellation. The three systems are strikingly alike.

When an Egyptian died, his soul descended to the realms of Tuat, or Hades. Here it passed through thirteen kingdoms, each with its own guardian deity, until it finally obtained emancipation at the end. The same thirteen kingdoms are to be found in the Gnostic book, "Pistis Sophia," and the soul is represented as passing through them in a similar manner. Only he who plays the part of Osiris in the Gnostic version is Jesus. In the Shingon sect there are thirteen Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, who take charge of the soul at death, the two last, Vairoc'ana and Kokuzo, remaining its permanent guardians. The whole conception of the state of the dead in Shingonism is Egyptian. It is certainly not Buddhist.