We shall presently come back to these points. For the present we will merely summarize what we have said, and remind the reader that Nagarjuna had personally "sampled" very much of the religious thought of India. He had been a Brahmanist and a Hinayanist. He had then become a Mahayanist, and since his conversion to that faith he had come into contact not only with the faith in Amitabha, but with faith in Vairoc'ana, with the Dragon's Palace, with the Iron Tower, with the Nagas, and with the religionists whose special symbol is the Vajra.

He then retired to South India, where he spent the rest of his days in writing books and evangelization. The Japanese historians whom I have read say nothing about his connection with Kanishka's Council; they say that after long and successful labours he died at Kos'ala, in the northern portion of South India.

He was a voluminous writer (the reader will find a long list of his works in the pages of Nanjo's "Catalogue of the Tripitaka"), and his influence on Northern Buddhism has been so great that one is not astonished to read that he was revered by many as a second Buddha, a teacher whose authority equalled that of S'akyamuni himself.

He may be said to have settled, for Buddhism, the long-disputed question of the existence of the soul, which had troubled generations of Buddhist thinkers.