Akshobya appears in the completed system of the Dhyani Buddhas as the Buddha specially connected with the East. There is practically only one Sutra devoted to him either in the Chinese Tripitaka or in the Thibetan Collection. I believe the Sutra has never yet been translated into English, but a translation into modern Japanese has recently been published, which is, however, in its modern form, almost as obscure as the Chinese original. Akshobya is especially connected with Manjus'ri. He is the author of long life, and much worshipped by means of Dharani.

Amitabha we have mentioned before. It is claimed by the Buddhists of Japan that he was preached about by S'akyamuni himself during the last years of his ministry. After S'akyamuni's time he apparently vanished from Buddhist consciousness; possibly he was taken across the Himalayas along with some travelling Buddhists, and so disappeared from the eyes of India. As'vaghosha and Nagarjuna both worshipped from afar; with Anshikao and

[paragraph continues] Lokaraksha he reappears in a literary form, fully developed. As'vaghosha and Nagarjuna would only know him by repute, as being natives of India proper; Anshikao and Lokaraksha, as coming from Central Asia, knew him more fully.

The doctrine of Amitabha is more fully developed now. When S'akyamuni consoled the Queen of Bimbisara he merely pointed her to Amitabha, whose mercies are Infinite, and who is ever near to comfort the distressed In the Sukhavati Vyuha, nearly every Chinese translation of which is by Central Asian hands, Amitabha is strangely and significantly changed. He has (more Buddhico again) been euhemerized, so to say; his genealogy is given; he is practically God Almighty; but he was once a man, and his present high station as the Lord of the Western Paradise, the Father and Saviour of them that trust in him, the psyxopompos meeting the soul at death and placing it in the mansion prepared for it, is all the result of a vow made countless centuries ago by a mere man, and pursued diligently through many lives, till it has resulted in the formation of a Paradise, and the opening of a salvation through Faith for them that invoke his name.

And, again significantly strange, more than a century after the Christian revelation, in a country in which Jews, Israelites, and Christians dwelt side by side with Buddhists and others, Amitabha is produced in literary form, developed into the first member of a quasi-Trinity. He is accompanied by his son, Avalokites'vara, the bisexual expression of his mercy, who in many forms and as many persons, was manifested upon earth to save the suffering,