The Kegon claims to be the first of S'akyamuni's preachings. It purports to have been delivered, during the first week after his Enlightenment, to seven assemblies in Heaven and Earth, all of which he addressed simultaneously without leaving his seat under the Bo-tree. It was delivered in a supernatural manner, and thus it came to pass that S'ariputra, Maitreya, Manjus'ri, and other disciples of a much later date, came to be spiritually present at it. It was followed by teachings adapted to ordinary people, whom he led by five stages to the perfection which he had found in the spiritual hearers of his first teachings. The five stages are (1) "smallness," the doctrines of Hinayana, based on the Four Truths and the Twelvefold Chain of Causation, as explained in the Agamas; (2) "beginning," i.e. of the Mahayana, in which the disciple is shown the unreality of things; (3) the "perfection," i.e. of the Mahayana, which consists in the realization of the existence of the Bhutatathata, or the impersonal God; (4) "suddenness," i.e. the direct attainment of the knowledge of God by straight and direct intuition; and (5) "completion," or the absolute identity between God and the soul. Thus step by step, according to the Kegon doctrines, were the believers led

to the accomplishment of that perfection which S'akyamuni had seen before him at the moment of his Enlightenment. The doctrine was certainly held in China and Japan. It has a Gnostic flavour. Whether Nagarjuna actually held it or not, I am not prepared to say.

The story of the visit to the Iron Tower is rejected by all sects in Japan except the Shingon, who make it the basis of their own teachings, and Nichiren, who was always plainspoken, did not hesitate to call Kobo Daishi the "prize-liar of Japan" (Nihon no dai mogo) for maintaining the truth of the story. I have already advanced reasons for believing that the Shingon is a form of Egyptian Gnosticism, closely allied with Basilidianism and the ancient religion of Egypt, and brought to Southern India by Egyptian merchants during the first century of our era. I need not repeat what I said. I should, however, add that the Japanese Shingon retains what many other sects have discarded--the practice of a species of Baptism, known as Kwanjo. It is administered with water, it may be reiterated; it is considered efficacious against disease; it may be administered vicariously on behalf of the dead. As regards its mode of administration, if the student will give himself the trouble to read what Irenaeus (lib. I. cap. xxi.) says of the Baptism administered by the Marcosians, he will see a picture of the Shingon administration, with its manual gestures, its mystic incantations, and even its opobalsamum or liquid unguents.

The truest disciples of Nagarjuna were to be found in