I might multiply examples, but I must content myself with one or two. In Egypt, the guardian deity of the first of the mansions in Tuat bears a name which signifies the "Crusher of the forehead of the enemies of Ra." In Japan it is Fudo Sama, the fierce-looking, but essentially kind-hearted, Being, who stands amidst the flames, and bears in his hands a sword wherewith to slay the enemies of man's soul. The Shingon astronomy speaks of twenty-eight chiku, or constellations, seven in each quarter of the heavens; the Egyptian astronomer knew the same, and spoke of them as the "gods of the twenty-eight finger-breadths of the Royal cubit." The Shingon astronomer uses the Egyptian signs of the Zodiac, the same as ours,

and not the Turkish cycle in ordinary use in Japan. The opening chapter of the "Saddharma pundarika Sutra" (the Hokekyo of Japan) is so like the opening chapters of the "Pistis Sophia" that it is impossible to resist the conclusion that the author of the latter work must have had before him either the "Saddharma pundarika Sutra" itself or a Sutra of a very similar type. The latter alternative is the more probable one. The Hokekyo is a composite work based on something that has gone before; and it is indeed most likely that the "Ur-evangelium" in its case was a Mahayana Sutra by some early Mahayanist writer. There are grounds for such a conjecture. In the list of Scriptures taken to China in A.D. 147 by Anshikao the Prince of Parthia, and translated by him into Chinese during the Han period, there is one, the "Marghabhumi Sutra" (Jap. Doshikyo ), the last three chapters of which are said by Nanjo to be based on the "Saddharma pundarika." Nanjo's statement is denied by some Japanese students, still the fact remains that there are portions of this Sutra which

strongly resemble the spirit and tone of the longer Scripture, which, in its longer and completer, form is evidently of later date.