The next thing that strikes us is the very elementary character of the Hinayana Buddhism that these men taught. There are some extremely elementary treatises amongst the Sutras translated--tracts, for instance, on the Four Truths, the Twelvefold Chain of Causation, the causes of Pain, the duty towards parents, the punishments of sin, the rewards of Virtue. The publication of these tracts seems to show that the Buddhist missionaries were doing pioneer work on untouched ground. The previous mission of Kas'yapa Matanga and Dharmaraksha (if indeed it had been a Buddhist mission at all) had evidently died out completely, and these men had to begin again. It is only thus that we can account for the necessity of publishing these elementary treatises. It is not yet more than fifty years since the re-introduction of

[paragraph continues] Christianity into Japan, but the day for elementary treatises is past already. We have our Bibles, our Testaments, our Prayer-books, our Catechisms--all standard books, in fact--in Japanese translations, and it would be next to an impossibility that they should be swept away even by a wholesale "destruction of books" such as the Chinese indulged in.

Had the "Heralding of the Son of Man," as I venture to call it, been a permanent or successful Buddhist mission, it would have left behind it literary memorials which would have made it unnecessary for the successors of those men to insist so much on the elements of Buddhism, the more so as both missions seem to have laboured in the same city of Loyang and its immediate vicinity.

There are, however, certain very distinctly Mahayanistic elements to be found in these ninety-six books of the Han translators, and notably in the twelve books attributed to Lokaraksha, who comes from the country of the Yuetchi, the very heart of the Kushan Empire. There are likewise Mahayanistic traces to be found in the writings of Anshikao, who was very possibly a Parthian hostage at the court of the Kushan kings.

Thus we find the use both of mudra and of mantra, of mystic gesticulations and of apparently meaningless