Five accounts are given of S'akyamuni's life. The Mahayanists were as busy with the life of their Founder as were the Gnostics with their Apocryphal Lives of Christ. (The most advanced of higher critics will, I think, allow that the received Gospels had all been written before the latter half of the second century.) There is a striking resemblance between the Apocryphal Gospels and the Mahayana Lives of S'akyamuni. In both, the whole stress is laid on the events connected with the infancy. Only one of the Apocryphal Gospels, that of Nicodemus, deals with the Death of Christ. Not one of the lives of S'akyamuni taken to China by the Han missionaries touches on the Nirvana of the Buddha. The silence is not without its significance. Gnostic and Mahayanist alike were by this time face to face with the higher claims of the Resurrection. The insistence on the mysteries of the Nativity of the Buddha may have

seemed to be the right way to offset the Crucifixion of the "Son of Man" and the Gospel of His Resurrection.

A great number of the Sutras deal with quite practical subjects--the curse of drunkenness, the evils of impurity, the twelvefold chain of causation, the causes of death the duty of kindness to children, etc. Many of this class are to be found in the various Agama Collections. Of those which deal with the life of S'akyamuni, from his birth to the commencement of his ministry, one especially, the Adbhuta-dharmapariyaya by an unknown translator, treats the whole subject in a theological and supernatural manner. Some introduce Bodhisattvas unknown to earlier Sutras, e.g. Maitreya and Manjus'ri, sometimes as interlocutors, and sometimes as principal exponents of the doctrines taught, and we may notice the gradual development of the Mahayana in the fact that whereas the Sutra of Forty-two Sections constantly speaks of Arhats, the books translated by the missioners from Central Asia often speak of Bodhisattvas, and there is a Sutra given which contains an explanation of the office, duties, and

privileges of a Bodhisattva. The new school of Prajna philosophy is represented by a translation of the Prajna Paramita Sutra in 10,000 couplets, but without Nagarjuna's commentary, which was possibly not accepted until the following century (say about A.D. 220). Little is apparently said about the Previous Buddhas, but two of the Dhyani Buddhas are mentioned, Akshobya and Amitabha, although the whole system of the Five Dhyani Buddhas does not yet seem to have been elaborated.