The leader of this successful mission to China was a Parthian prince known to us as Anshikao. His real personal name is not given (Anshikao merely means "Prince of the Ansi," i.e. Parthians), but it is said that he resigned his throne to his uncle in order to become a monk, and that he was the son of a famous king who had been the enemy of Trajan and the friend of Hadrian. All this enables us to identify him with Axidares, the son of Pachorus, whom his father had nominated to the Armenian throne, shortly after A.D. 100, thereby giving much offence to the Emperor Trajan. Pachorus' successor on the Parthian throne, his brother Chosroes, at once apologized to Rome for the error in judgment that Pachorus had made, deposed Axidares in haste, nominated his younger nephew Parthamasiris in his stead, and wrote to Rome begging for investiture on his behalf. But Trajan refusing to listen, Parthamasiris surrendered himself, and was at first treated with clemency, but was afterwards murdered about A.D. 115. There seems to be little doubt that the prince Axidares, deposed about A.D. 108 by his uncle, and ousted from his Armenian kingdom, after his brother's death, by a distant relative, retired to a cloister, as others have done who have experienced

the sorrows of a vain world, and eventually, as an elderly man and a tried ecclesiastic, became the leader of the Buddhist mission to China.

But Axidares (may we call him by his title Anshikao?) was the nephew of Chosroes, and the son of Pachorus. He was therefore the nephew of King Tiridates, and consequently the nephew of that King of Armenia who had sent an invitation to the Apostle Thomas to preach the gospel in the Parthian dominions.

"And here comes in the most remarkable incident in a remarkable story:--Tiridates had been a Mazdean priest, and was so strict an observer of Mazdean rites and ceremonies that, to prevent any possibility of defiling the element water, he, instead of taking the ordinary route and embarking at Antioch direct for Rome, insisted on making the long journey overland through the entire length of Asia Minor to the Hellespont, and thence round the head of the Adriatic to the Capital. His grand-nephew, Axidares, or Vargash, had taken orders in Buddhism. In his desire to quit the vanities of a life of royalty, whose instabilities mocked him at every step, he had found no refuge in Mazdeism and no place in which a sorely tried spirit could find relief. The preaching of the sage As'vaghosha had thrown a bridge over the chasm between Mazdeism and Buddhism, and the doctrines of Christianity as taught by St. Thomas had shown how superior to the bondage of the ceremonial law was the freedom inculcated by it as well as the new Buddhism. Buddhism, without breaking away from Mazdean tradition, offered in its conventional monasticism just that escape for which the soul of the sorely tried