Another trace, again, of the Mahayana teachings may be found in the presence of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas other than S'akyamuni. The Hinayana knows of S'akyamuni's predecessors, Five Previous Buddhas, as they are called. The Mahayana has many of them. In the "Sukhavati Vyuha," for instance, which is one of the Han versions, there are eighty-one Buddhas previous to Hozo Biku, who is afterwards known as Amitabha, besides a large number of Buddhas exercising their functions simultaneously with and independently of S'akyamuni. One of these is Akshobya, another Amitabha, the one representing the East, the other the West; the one that perfect wisdom which is unmovable because it rests firmly on the thought of Buddha, the other that same perfect wisdom which has run its course and destroyed its doubts, and so is at rest. Many new Bodhisattvas appear: S'ariputra,

[paragraph continues] Maudgalyayana, Katyayana, have not attained to Buddhahood, but Samantaprabha, Manjus'ri, Avalokites'vara, Maitreya, Bhadrapala, are all mentioned. Some of these are evidently human Bodhisattvas. Bhadrapala, said to have been one of the few laymen to attain to the Bodisattvaship, is now sometimes installed in Japan as the patron-deity of a temple bathroom. Manjus'ri and Maitreya, once fabled as disciples of S'akyamuni's, appear again in re-incarnations. The one appears in China at Wutaishan; the other, while dwelling permanently in the Tushita Heaven, is fabled at a later time to have come down on earth to preach for Asangha. Only Avalokites'vara is an eternal Being. He is the son of Amitabha. He has no earthly history; he has come down to earth at divers times and in sundry manners, but always to help man. He is intimately connected with Maitreya, the Buddha of the Future, for whose coming Japan still waits.

It is no longer the old canon of the Tripitaka that is in use. Kas'yapa's collection of the Tripitaka is discussed, as are also the charges against Ananda which kept him outside the first Council of the Sthavira held in the Rajagriha Cave after S'akyamuni's death. But Anshikao to some extent, and Lokaraksha almost exclusively, uses the third canon of the Scriptures, the collection fabled to have been made, independently of Sthaviras and Mahasanghikas, by S'ariputra and Maudgalyayana, parts of which were brought back to India by Katyayana at the close of the last century B.C., and the remainder by Nagarjuna from the Dragon's Palace. There is also some mention of the books which Nagarjuna is said to have received from Vajrasattva at the Iron Temple in South India. There are selections from the Prajnaparamita, from the Avatamsakas, from Abhidharma S'astras, all of which are books of late origin.