History of Pure Land Buddhism

English translation of the French language text “History of Pure Land Buddhism”

Amidism, it has been said, is “the flower of the Mahayana”; it is “the most elegant form” of it. ^¹ Other voices, even inside Buddhism, have denounced it as “degeneration”. ^² To a certainty, the question arises, and the preceding chapters could not have failed to touch upon it already: to what degree is this cult so individual still genuinely Buddhist? But before trying to answer that, it will be of use to look in the first place for the part influences come from the West may have in its constitution.

The idea of a “salvation” effected by grace and of a “saviour” in whom one possesses everything, the trusting, ardent and tender piety towards this “saviour” most assuredly lead us to think of Christianity. In his last work, which appeared shortly after his death, Father Leon Wieger, who knew the Amidist religion through having studied it at length at once as a scholar and as a direct observer, stressed this resemblance, in which he saw, at the same time as a reason for admiring the devotion of Amida’s faithful, a great obstacle to their conversion. ^³ Three centuries earlier, moved by analogous observations, the bonze Tchou-hong, Abbot of the Yun-si-se pagoda near Hangchow, wrote to Father Matthew Ricci to complain: Christianity, he said, “copies the teaching of the Pure Land”.^⁴

No historian could retain the explanation of this bonze. But several have not thought themselves able to account for the resemblance observed on both sides without recourse to the contrary hypothesis. They have thought of an influence exerted by Christianity, especially in its Nestorian form. Quite recently also, Reverend Father Pierre Humbertclaude wrote that Amidism is “sometimes so close to us that we cannot stop ourselves from firmly believing in some borrowing made from Nestorianism”. ^⁵

They have gone so far as to speak, with less discretion, of a “Buddhism of the Far East, an Asiatic form of the Gospel”. “An imitation of Christianity”, wrote in 1907 Canon Leon Joly^⁶, without putting himself to the trouble however of any exact examination. It is in the works of the Scot J. Stewart^⁷ and the Japanese Yoshiro Sacki^⁸ that the hypothesis has been most systematically extended. Now it is not without some plausibility.

An insufficiently controlled need for symmetry, joined to arbitrary considerations on the compared genius of Christianity and Buddhism, has suggested to some historians that, setting aside a small number of negligible facts, the first had at any time spread only over the West, while the second marched to the conquest of the Far East. In reality, the two great missionary religions have not so naturally shared the world. They have not always “reciprocally turned their backs”, and the obstacle that both encounter, each from its own side, has not remained invincible to the force of Christian propaganda. The Christian expansion across the Asiatic continent as far as the great Chinese cities of the east coast is a fact of the first importance, much more massive than the constitution, hypothetical moreover, of a few small “Gnostic-Buddhist coteries” in Egypt and Syria.^⁹

The Christianity of the “eastern Church”, which we call today quite inaccurately “Nestorian”, and which M. Jean Dauvillier proposes to name simply “Chaldean” in accordance with its geographical centre of radiation, had begun the conquest of central Asia as early as the first years of the fifth Century. Two centuries later, in 631, it was implanted at Tch’ang-an, the T’ang capital. Emperor T’ai t-sung had authorised it by an edict in 638, and its diffusion had been so rapid that soon it possessed monasteries “in a hundred cities”. After a short persecution which occurred in 698 - 700, its situation was re-established, and the famous inscription of Si-ngan-fou (then Tch’ang-an) was able to commemorate in 781 its victorious progress. ^¹0 “It is nearly impossible”, judged Father Henry Doré, “that Buddhism, especially Amidism, living side by side with Nestorianism in the capital and elsewhere, should not have sustained some more or less profound influence from this proximity”. ^¹1 To this influence Mr Sacki attributes the fact that, setting out from the seventh Century, the ancient Chinese idea of “Sky” is seen gradually changing, in various schools, into the notion of a personal God. It is this influence also which he sees at work in the eighth century, in the rapid success of the personalist conception of the Buddha Vairocana. How can we believe that it would not be executed still more in the case of Amidism? Chan-t’ao lived exactly at the time of the first expansion of Christianity in the Empire; Emperor Kao-tsung (650 - 638), whose intimate he was, bestowed his favour on the Christians; there were already at that time links of collaboration and friendship between Christians and Buddhists. Is not that more than necessary to explain his preaching of a “saviour of infinite light” and “a life eternal through faith in Amitabha”? ^¹2

Was Japan itself then brought directly into contact with Christianity? Some traces of Nestorian preaching have been pointed out in Nara; but the discovery is not certain. ^¹3 In 736, an Iranian was welcomed at court, brought by diplomatic mission which was returning from China; but this fact is too slight to build on. Only, everything that China exported then to Japan, so receptive with regard to religious ideas, had a chance of bearing a Christian stamp. The hypothesis appears certainty to M. Sacki: “Many things borrowed by our ancestors from China in the course of the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries were Christian thoughts in Chinese dress, like those words that we thought not long ago to be purely and simply Chinese, but which scholars have proved to us were in reality Greek or Hebrew.” Among these things, there are two which have more especially claimed the attention of the comparatists: the charitable institutions and the “kwancho” rite.

Empress Komyo, known for her Amidist fervour, founded in Nara in 730 a refuge and dispensary for the poor, the Seyaku-in. ^¹4 It is told even that she cared with her own hands for a thousand of these unfortunates. In the ardour of her charity, she is said to have sucked one day the sores of one of them: now this was a heavenly being, who disappeared into the air in the midst of a dazzling light. ^¹5 Was not this far-off Empress the sister of several Christian princesses? Moreover, does not this very name of Komyo, which signifies “great light”, translate the word by which Nestorian Christianity was designated, the “luminous” or “radiant” religion? ^¹6 Given to the charitable Empress, would not such a name constitute a testimony to the sentiments of Christian origin which animated her?

A little later, when Kukai (Kobo Daishi) arrived in Kyoto, after a long stay in China, he brought back a new system, the Shingon, in which likewise certain Christian elements are thought to be recognised. It was in 807. he brought back in particular a rite, the kwancho (= “water on the head”), which he would soon administer to his emulator Saicho (Denzyo Daishi), the founder of the Tendai. The latter would confer it in his turn on the Emperor, as well as on the principal officiating Priests of the great Temples. This rite is a kind of Buddhist baptism. It is an effect, said Kukai in his Hizoki, “of Buddha’s great compassion for beings in order to make them capable of attaining the highest illumination”.^¹7 Would it not be an imitation of the rite observed in the Chinese capital, where Kukai had spent several years? In addition to a Manichaen church, at least four churches of eastern Christianity were to be reckoned then. Would it not be the same again for the psalmodies brought back almost at the same time by Saicho from the Tien-T’ai mountains? ^¹8 And would not such borrowings be tokens of other borrowings, more important although less perceptible?

This does not bring to an end the possibilities of Christian influences. The thirteenth Century is for Amidism, with Honen and Shinran, a new epoch of privileged development. Now this was the epoch when the Christians, Nestorians or Latins - not to speak of the Byzantines, who did not have any regular organisation in the Far East - enjoyed the eclectic favour of the first Mongol Emperors. They have their organised hierarchy in Cambaluc (Peking) and in the whole Chinese Empire. In 1254, Guillaume de Rubrouck found the Nestorians solidly established in fifteen towns of Cathay. They were more settled there than has sometimes been said: for, in spite of the terrible proscription of 845, certain communities had succeeded in maintaining themselves there (still at the end of the eleventh Century there was one in Canton), and a return of the faithful was effected through the North, in the eleventh and twelfth Centuries, before the Mongol conquest. ^¹9 What happened in the seventh and eighth centuries, has therefore every chance of happening again in the thirteenth. In China itself, the traces of this new Christian influence will be lost quite quickly; but “the insular isolation” in which Japan subsequently lived will have enabled her to preserve them better. ^²0 Such is the conviction of the Reverend Arthur Lloyd: “Some of the greatest libraries in Kyoto contain ample testimonies to the fact that Christianity was known in Japan a long time before the arrival of the Jesuits. This knowledge would have been acquired not only through the Nestorians but also through the Mongols.”^²1

Such also is the conviction of Y. Sacki: the new rigour of the ideas of grace and faith in the Jodo-Shin, as well as the legal and canonical marriage of the “Priests” which is customary in it, could not have any other origin: were not the Nestorian Priests married? ^²2 Others appeal to more precise signs: when Shinran spread his message with so much success, was not this at the moment when there had just appeared a Chinese edition of the New Testament, which seems indeed, according to some people, to have strongly inspired him? ^²3 Would not Shinran himself have perhaps copied with his own hand the text of the Gospel, and would not this venerable copy have preserved in the Honganji archives? ^²4 Outside every apologetic design, such comparisons, such hypotheses exert a kind of fascinating attraction, for whoever seeks to discern across our planet the web of spiritual traffic. If they were verified, they would hem round an event of major importance, more considerable still, to a certainty, than the graft of Hellenism from which rose one day, at Gandhara, Greco-Buddhist art to spread itself in increasing waves to the extreme limits of the East. It is not only Christian missionaries and Western historians who have expressed them. It is also Bonzes on occasion. Representatives of non-Amidist sects have charged these with letting themselves be contaminated by Christian elements. ^²5 An adherent of the Jodo-Shin, the Bonze Yamahi, a Professor in Kyoto, also declared not long ago that the parallelisms observable between the two religions lead us irresistibly to admit religious encounters between them; “it becomes every day more certain”, he added, “that the points of fusion have been more numerous than was supposed”.^²6

All this, however, remains a bit vague. Supposing the reality of some Christian influence, it could hardly be a question of only a late influence. In fact, it was in 631 that the famous Nestorian Monk known under his Chinese name of A-lo-pen (or O-lo-pen) arrived in China, the first of his religion. Now Amidism had then been a long time in possession of its basic doctrine. Its Chinese “Patriarch”, Houei-yuan (+416), had lived more than two centuries previously. In the seventh Century, it is true, it reached its full maturity, under the influence of Chan-t’ao (+ about 660). but we do not see that Chan-t’ao transformed in an appreciable manner, in a way which would cause us to suspect the influence of some Christian idea, the teaching dispensed before him, from the time of Houei-yuan, T’an-luan (+ 542) and Tao-ch’ao (+645). Was he himself ready to form a relationship with the Nestorians, who had arrived just the day before? It is at the least doubtful. In any case, if this relationship existed, it is not impossible that it communicated to his thinking “a new impetus, a new activity”^²7 , but no more than that can be said. Now it is Chan-t’ao’s work that Honen and Shinran were to take for a foundation; it is in this work that they were to read: “By the power of the invocation of Amida made with one breath during a certain number of thoughts, sins and karma cease to be.” On the other hand, if the inscription of 781 shows the close association of a Buddhist and a Christian, it tends perhaps to prove, rather than the contrary, an influence of Buddhism, and especially of Amidism, at least on the expression of the Christian faith. “To voyage in the vessel of Compassion so as to go up to the Palace of Light”: the one who wrote this sentence borrowed Amidist language. ^²8 As for a belated influence of Christianity in the capital of Kublai Khan and his successors, if it was exerted in some manner, it is close that it was subsequent to all the essential developments of Amidism, Chinese as much as Japanese.

The charitable foundations of Empress Komyo did not constitute an innovation in Japan. Establishments analogous to hers are attested at dates a little anterior, notably in 724 under Empress Gensho. Perhaps we must go back for the first of them to the initiative of Prince Shotoku himself, who annexed to the Shitennoji Temple, or Temple of the Four Heavenly Guardians, founded by him in 592, an orphanage, dispensary and hospital for the needy. We must acknowledge however that only an apocryphal work speaks to us of this. ^²9 As for the name of Komyo, it loses a lot of its possible impact if it is noted that it is only a posthumous title. In fact, as early as its arrival in central Asia then in China, Buddhism had brought from India, “with its doctrines of salvation, its formulas for health”, and its Monks distributed Indian drugs in charitable institutions. ^³0

The kwanjo has never been in use in Admidist sects; but if its Christian origin was established, the hypothesis of a Christian influence on Amidism would assume none-the-less a concrete consistency. Such does not seem however the case. It needs imagination to judge, with Arthur Lloyd, that the rite conferred by Kobo Daishi or by Denzyo Daishi has much of a resemblance to the rite described in the Philosophumena as characterising “the heresy of Calliscutus”. ^³1 Its character of esoteric initiation is not found in baptism, and there is moreover no reason to appeal to the latter in order to explain a matter of usage as widespread as the ablution with water. It is fitting also to recall that the rites of abhiseka (this is the Sanskrit word which translates the Japanese kwanjo), which already existed in pre-Buddhist India, have numerous attestations in Indian and Chinese Buddhism. ^³2

Finally, everything essential in Amidist doctrine is already contained in the fundamental sutras, which were, as we have said, translated into Chinese setting out from the second Century. Even the Sutra of the Meditation on Amitayus, translated about 424, is much anterior to the introduction of Nestorianism into China. On the other hand, we do not easily see how it would be possible, going back further than this introduction, to imagine some influence of Christianity on budding Amidism, in Khotan, in the region of the Oxus, or in some other unknown region of central Asia. People have sometimes spoken a lot, in mysterious terms, of such an influence, which would be exerted on the very formation of the Mahayana, “in the north of India, where already, through Persia, the evangelical preaching had certainly penetrated”: but such a hypothesis is too general to be able to be usefully discussed. Documents preserved in Nepal and Tibet have been evoked: but we have had to acknowledge that these documents have remained inaccessible. ^³3 Reverend Arthur Lloyd not long ago thought to hold “four links of the chain which binds the Japanese Mahayana, and particularly the doctrine of the Jodo-Shin-Shu” to the times and heresies of the New Testament”; the God of the Bible appears to him to be the prototype of the Buddha of the Pure Land and he saw the sect of Shinsen as descending in a straight line from the sect of the Ophites which flourished in Asia Minor in the first two centuries. But it is doubtless permissible to see in such historical explanations only erudite fantasies. ^³4

It is not that all infiltration of elements of Christian origin into the cult or the writings of the Great Vehicle is improbable. ^³5 Traces of them are found, for example, in certain traits of the late legend of Sakyamuni. ^³6

But nothing of them is perceptible today in what concerns Amidism. As we said earlier, the Christian conquest of central Asia began about the beginning of the fifth Century, perhaps already towards the end of the fourth. But Amida had preceded Christ there. There was afterwards an important Nestorian Christianity in Tibet;^³7 but this fact is at once too late (eighth and ninth centuries) and too little in touch with Amidism to deserve to claim our attention. Tuan-huang had, about the same epoch, a Christian community, but it also came too late to have been able to bend in the direction of its own faith the first beliefs of Amitabha’s devotees. ^³8

Did Christian monotheism count for something in the formation of the doctrine of the Adi-Buddha, a doctrine of which a reflection can be seen in the cult of Vairocana? Garbe thought so, but his hypothesis appears to have little foundation, ^³9 and the origins of Amidism would moreover scarcely be explained by it. It remains permissible to suppose that when Chinese Christianity had almost entirely succumbed, at the time of the great persecution of 845, the traces which remained of it were able to play here or there the role of seeds. ^⁴0 It must be admitted however that no-one has yet cited a single certain instance where Buddhism was seriously affected by the Christian dogma, where in its Amidist form or other forms. This judgement of Sir Charles Eliot ^⁴1 was ratified, a few years ago, by Reverend Father Henri Bernard.

Other historians have sought in other directions. Mr Sylvain Levi thought that the Buddhas were belatedly conceived as saviours under the influence of Hellenistic syncretism. In the beginnings of Buddhism, no precise idea of a saviour is in fact found. The Indian vocabulary has besides no word which corresponds to such an idea. Now, in the Hellenistic Kingdoms, the successors of Alexander the Great wrapped themselves up everywhere in the title of Soter. The Chancellor’s office of the Indo-Greek Kings, which was bilingual, had therefore to look for a Sanskrit word to render, in some sort of a way, this title. It adopted the substantive Tratar, a word quite rare, derived from the root tra (to defend, to protect). Soon, opposite the Tratar, saviours, there appeared the Trata, the saved. Then the two words penetrated into the Buddhist vocabulary. Numerous names of Monks finishing in Trata are found: such as Dharmatrata, “saved by the Law”, an illustrious author, whom tradition associates, like Asvaghosa, with the memory of the powerful king Kanishka, and Buddha Sakyamuni himself was finally called Trayin, Tayin, “the saviour”. ^⁴2

However interesting these inquiries of a political and philological order, they appear far from sufficing to render an account of the important religious evolution which finished by causing to be admitted, into a whole portion of Buddhism, the idea of a salvation obtained by the grace of a “saviour”; let us rather say, in order not to risk a premature interpretation, an idea analogous to this. Why did Buddhism open to this word Tratar, as the Chancellor’s offices opened to it? Or else, why not simply those “saved by the Law”? Why those “saved by Amida” ? We can most certainly think that the conception of the “saviour king” has played a role, here as in other cases, in the religious consciousness. ^⁴3 But, as in those other cases, this role can only have been a modest one. Better, without doubt, following close upon Mr Sylvain Levi ^⁴4 himself, Sir Charles Eliot ^⁴5, Raphael Petrucci ^⁴6, Joseph Hackin ^⁴7, Jean Przyluski ^⁴8, Paul Pelliot, Miss Marie-Therese de Mallman, and yet others, to turn towards Iran, and more particularly Zorastrian Iran.

It is in fact in the Iranian or Iranianised countries that the cult of Amitabha makes its appearance, and it is mainly men originally from Iran or neighbouring countries who carry it as far as China. The first translator of the Sukhavati Sutra worked under the orders of An-chu-kao, that is, “Arsace who was great in the century”, called the “Parthian Marquis”, who was, we know, a veritable Iranian, a member of the royal family of the Arsacides, son of a Prince ruling over the confines of present-day Afghanistan, and who renounced the throne to become a Monk and missionary. ^⁴9 Let us reserve for a moment the question of Sukhavati itself. The figure of its King is not only unknown to the Buddhism “of the south” and absent from the first Scriptures; no Indian root is found in it. Now it is not without resemblance to the Vahu-Mano (the “Good Thought”), who is one of the Amesha-Spenta of the Avesta. ^⁵0 Is it not like the latter a personification of light? ^⁵1 The presumption of relationship increases somewhat if we do not envisage it alone. In fact, “the other figures of his group have a prominence and role more in the background, but, with the five localisations, five colours, five elements, five senses which correspond to them, all intimately reflect the speculations then in vogue on the ancient Amisha-Spenta, become the five Amahraspan or Amhaspand.” ^⁵2

The two parallel mythologies could therefore each be the fruit of the characteristic aptitude of Mazdeism “forming hypostasis”. ^⁵3 Deemed to appear, at the time of sunset, behind the western mountain, Amitabha creates again a figure of a divinity not only luminous but solar, and - just as with Maitreya - we then think naturally of Mithra: “It was the Sun in its divine light which was venerated, in the guise of Mithra, Surya or Amitabha, by the Indo-Scythian Kings, the authors of the Aksyupanishad and the Sukhavati-vyuha”. ^⁵4 Finally, under his other name of Amitayus, this “Buddha of age immeasurable” could also evoke for us the Zorvan akarana of the ancient Iranian religions, in an amended version, and his royal aspect could well be again a heritage from Iran, as perhaps is to be seen in the re-arranged text of the Lalitavistara for the two future Buddhas, Sakyamuni and Maitreya. ^⁵5 Everything therefore invites us, it seems, to see in this royal God “in whose person the notion of infinity penetrates that of light and time”, a Buddhist adaptation, it not of an Iranian divinity, at least “of an Iranian conception of divinity”. ^⁵6

Avalokitesvara, who was originally without links to Amitabha, has very distinct Indian forefathers. One of his roles can be compared to the role of the Purusha who, in the Rig-Veda, “envelops the moon and goes beyond it”. ^⁵7 We have alluded to it earlier. Miss de Mallman, who admits a “Chaldeo-Iranian” element in the origin of this great Bodhisattva, shows however in detail how his figure was constituted only inside Indian Buddhism, where he has assumed moreover some traits come from the old Vedic tradition then from magical Saivism. ^⁵8 Mr Alfred Foucher sees him originally as a Buddhist imitation of Mahesvara the Terrible, who was at the same time Siva the Propitious, a God whose cult existed about the beginning of our era in the mountains of north-western India. It was from this Mahesvara that our Bodhisattva would have “ostensibly borrowed, in addition to the main point of his name, his white colour, his flask of ambrosia and the manner of his supernatural manifestations”. ^⁵9 And for his part Mr Jean Filliozat finds for him “a precise Indian antecedent, Sanatkumara, which does away with looking for an Iranian model for him”. ^⁶0 But all this does not prevent Avalokitesvara, once become, somewhere in central Asia, a reflection of Amitabha, from finding himself expressing in this new role an idea which could well be Iranian. None of the religious conceptions of India render as well an account of the relations which exist between a dhyani-Buddha and his Bodhisattva, as the Zoroastrian doctrine of the Fravashi, those luminous beings who are as it were the apparitional doubles of the Amesha-Spenta, and who on the other hand fill the role of tutelary angels in respect of creatures. ^⁶1 Moreover, as he is shown in chapter 24 of the Lotus, a chapter which we known constitutes an interpolation, Avalokitesvara “seems to present the latest aspect of a personage closely related”, him also, “to Mithra”. ^⁶2 And the theme of his miracles, the piece de resistance of this chapter, corresponds even in its literal expression, to the “litanies” of the God Sransha in the Srosh Yasht Hadokkt, which is one of the books of the Zend-Avesta. ^⁶3

Sukhavati is no more than Avalokitesvara in absolute and indissoluble connection with Amitabha. According to some texts, its King is Sakyamuni. Besides, ancient Buddhism had imagined Heavens which, at the very least for the setting, were already very like it: palaces encased one within the other, with, in the centre, the pavilion of Indra. ^⁶4 Another analogy suggests itself: the city of the Cakravastin, that is, of the universal monarch, is exactly conceived in the ancient Buddhist writings as Sukhavati will be. On both sides they describe to us at the same time a royal city and a divine garden. On both sides it is the same plan, the same design of the palaces and porticos, the same disposition of the gardens in the four angles of the principal building, the same lakes, the same kind of trees, the same throne in the middle. More precisely, on both sides a septenary scheme dominates: there are seven rows of walls, seven screens of trees, seven kinds of jewel, etc. Let us read, for example, in the texts of the Little Vehicle, the description of Kusavati, residence of the Cakravartin:

“The capital, O Ananda, was surrounded by seven enclosing walls. One of these was of gold, one of silver, one of beryl, one of crystal, one of ruby, one of coral, one of every jewel . . .

“Between each of these seven walls were tala trees, which formed rows and were entirely made of precious substances. On the tala trees of gold, the branches, leaves, flowers and fruits were of silver. On the trees of silver, they were of gold. On the trees of beryl, they were of crystal. One the trees of crystal, they were of beryl . . When these various trees were moved by the breath of the winds, there went out from them a sweet and wonderful sound, able to rejoice all hearts.

We see that in the two cases all the imagery is the same. In the two cases also, Buddhism uses a cosmic scheme already current in India at the moment of its birth or at least of its first developments. This scheme is found in fact in the Upanishads. The Aksupanishad distinguishes seven successive Bhumikas, as the Little Vehicle distinguishes seven Bhumis - seven superposed terraces, seven stages (viharas) to climb - which mark the stages of the Arhat’s career. The commentaries on the Bhagavad-Gita are also acquainted with the seven Bhumis, and the Great Vehicle begins by adopting them, before stopping at the number of ten, for the Bodhisattva’s career. ^⁶6 A few centuries before the Christian era, the septenary scheme had therefore taken the place in India of an ancient tripartite division (augmented sometimes by a fourth member), or was combined with it. Now, from the three sthanas of the Upanishads, respective places of the waking consciousness, dream and deep sleep, or of the three dhatus of Buddhism, one does not see any normal transition to the seven Bhumikas and seven Bhumis. It seems necessary to seek the origin of this sudden change or interference, with Jean Przyluski and Paul Mus, ^⁶7 in an invasion of mesopotamian ideas, which had first of all conquered Iran, and the era of expansion of which had just been stretched wider by the victories of Dasius (522 - 486), annexing the Indus valley and the Punjab to the Achemenian empire.

The Babylonian cosmos was a high mountain “on which seven zones corresponded to the circles traced by the planets around the celestial axis”^⁶8 : this was to be also, beginning from this epoch, the scheme of the Indian cosmos. It was the pyramid of seven degrees, the prasad, which the new-born Buddha stepped over with his seven enormous strides in order to come to occupy, right at the top, the same place which was occupied by the God-King of Babylon. ^⁶9 Ecbatanus was supposed to have seven rows of walls, in seven different colours, in relation to the seven planets, in the image of the antique city of Uruk in Mesopotamia, which was designated by the same ideogram as the rainbow. The tower of Babylon, like a number of other ziggurats, had seven storeys: thus, later, the great Buddhist Temple of Barabudur in Java was to have seven superposed terraces. The last stage of the tower was, it seems, of contrasting colours: so is the last enclosing wall of Kusavati, according to the Mahasuddasana-sutta. ^⁷0 But all these details, so important as signs of migrations of ideas and historical relations between civilisations, concern only the remote pre-history of Sukhavati, taken (considered) in its external structure. Envisaged in this way, it can be said Sukhavati simply offers us “the projection into Buddhist soteriology of ideas then current concerning paradises”; it is nothing other than an “embellished and amplified replica of the various divine abodes that Buddhist cosmology spaced out on the terraces of Meru”. ^⁷1 Only, while almost everywhere else - in India and Buddhism itself as well as in the West, where the Babylonian scheme knew a triumphal success ^⁷2 - the last of the seven spheres or the seven lands alone was found usually to make the end, or was even to be gone beyond like the others, Sukhavati, like the city of the Cakravastin, contains in itself all the abodes which its seven enclosing walls differentiate.

The main point, however, is not this external structure, nor the cosmic scheme that it supposes. The main point is so much less this, that one of the characteristics of Amidism is to throw somewhat in the shade cosmological speculations, even interiorised mystically. We know well enough that the same images, like the same numerical signs, submit to very diverse uses, according to the spirit of the doctrines. It is the spirit of Amidism which it is of moment to envisage; it is the internal structure of Sukhavati. Now, in relation to all that we know of the Indian Buddhism of the first centuries, Sukhavati represents a contribution in great part new. It is not assimilable in fact either to the abode of the ephemeral Gods, or to Nirvana. The first are of a much grosser essence, and the second, being beyond the extreme point of existence, transcends all description. It is a Kingdom of happiness, from which one no longer falls into a miserable condition; it is the Kingdom of a Buddha, which one enters by the grace of this Buddha. These two characteristics put it in a class apart.

Ancient Buddhism was well acquainted with the Anagamin, that is, men of whom it was said that, delivered from the “five impediments of this world”, they would no more have to return (come back) on earth, but would obtain the state of Arhat in the Paradise to which they were transported rather than reborn there. ^⁷3 It was acquainted too with the “Brahma Heaven”, an abode very superior to all the other paradises. Buddha himself would have enjoined the quest for it by the practice of Brahmaviharas, or “Brahmanic stations”, a practice of four graduated meditations comparable to the four dhyanas. One narrative of the Digha nikaya showed Brahma giving his help to Govinda in order to permit him to attain his heaven. ^⁷4 “To be reborn close to Brahma”, to attain “the felicity of Brahma”, or “to become a Brahma King”, this was not only to rise to the existence of a superior deva: it was, according to a tradition received from the Upanishads, to be assured of a condition privileged for the attaining of Nirvana. ^⁷5 These are anticipations but partial, and aiming only at exceptional cases. As for the very personage of Amitabha, Iran offers us for the conception of his Pure Land a parallel which seems weightier and more minutely detailed. In the Avesta, four heavens are described: the first three are the paradises of good thoughts, good words and good actions. Above them is the country of “infinite light”. It is a country of harmony, freshness and glory. Ahura-Mazda himself presides there. This paradise can be gained by prayer, and especially by the sovereign efficacy of the name of Ahura-Mazda taken as a formula of invocation. ^⁷6

Perhaps, these various signs once observed, we might be authorised to find a kind of historical confirmation in an account given by Taranatha, the Tibetan historian of Buddhism. According to Taranatha, the cult of Amitabha goes back to a certain Saraha, or Rahulabhadra, a great magician and master of Nagarjuna. This man was supposed to have seen Amitabha in the country of Dhingkota and to have died with his face turned towards Sukhavati. “I have not found an explanation for the name Dhingkota”, wrote Sir Charles Eliot, “but the name of Saraha does not sound Indian; his legend presents him as a Sudra; Tibetan paintings show him with a beard and chignon, holding an arrow in his hand. This can hardly be called historical. It can be seen however that the first person whom tradition puts into relation with the cult of Amitabha was a man of low caste, bearing a foreign name, who saw the divinity in an unknown region and who had an appearance quite different from that of a Buddhist Monk. Most certainly, it cannot be proved that this man came from the land of the Oxus or from Turkestan, but such an origin would explain many things. From another point of view, there would be no difficulty at all in admitting a Zoroastrian influence in the region of Peshawar or Takkasila, on the frontiers of India.” ^⁷7

However, Iran certainly does not explain everything. India should not be forgotten, or even Indian Buddhism. We recoil from the formula of the Reverend Father Wieger, stating formerly that “Amidism is a Mazdean sect”. ^⁷8 He himself has completely changed his opinion since then. ^⁷9

It can be remarked that Amitayus is in certain respects the equivalent of Kala in Hinduism, which is like him a hypostasis of time. It can be ascertained that, through the Buddha of the Pure Land, it is “the eternity of Brahman and Agni”, even if it is enriched by Iranizing contributions, which “takes the freedom of the city in Buddhism”. ^⁸0 It can also be recalled that the idea of light, so fundamental in the Sukhavativyuhas, is scarcely less so in other Mahayanist Sutras; and that it could moreover be received naturally from the Vedic tradition, and is by no means absent from the Hinayana. ^⁸1 Witness what is reported by the Nidanakatha of the light which spread through the whole of space immediately after the Buddha’s illumination (enlightenment): “The ten thousand universes, in their revolutions, appeared like an aggregate of separate garlands, or like a bouquet of flowers artistically arranged, and between them the intervening spaces were no more than one sole light, them whose eight thousand places had never been penetrated, even by the rays of the seven suns.” ^⁸2 We therefore have a right to conclude, with M. Paul Mus, that there was “in the tradition of Bodh-Gaya a personage quite ready to assume the name of Amitabha”: it was Sakyamuni. ^⁸3 On the other hand, the “Great Miracle” which we have seen is at the root of all the Buddhology of the Great Vehicle and of the doctrine of the Pure Lands, “evolves in a Brahmanic setting”; it offers “the exact replica of the dispersion of Prajapati, or of the Purusha, in the person of the Gods of the world, and of his reconstitution in Agni, identified with the complete circle of the regents of the eastern regions.” Doubtless the case of Amitabha is not in all things the same as that of the four other principal “dhyani-Buddhas”, and his first extra-Buddhist, extra-Indian, source explains his more marked personality; but insofar as he enters the system of the five Jinas, his role was defined in advance by some fundamentally Indian ideas, the transmission of which appears continued, from the Rig-Veda, through the Brahmanas, the Upanishads and even Pali Buddhism. ^⁸4 On this thousand-leaved lotus, Amida, as well as Sakyamuni, Vairocana or some other, is the heir of Brahma, “father of the world”. The “lotus-wombs” of his Sukhavati are also “not from Outer-Pamir”. The Western Paradise has some exact parallels in the Brahmanic literature: the “City of the Setting One”, the “Happy (sukha) City of the Regent of the West”, the City of the great luminous God Varuna. ^⁸5 This City, in the description of it given by the Jaiminiya-Brahmana, rises above all the other worlds, and its waters full of blue and white lotuses, its perfumes, its harmonies, the crowd of its apsaras, could well have served as a model for the writers of the Sutras of Amida. ^⁸6 All these characteristics incline us to think that in the measure in which we have the right to consider it as one of the expressions of the Mahayana, Amidism is explicable (to be explained) in some of its sources by “the Pali tradition, guided by the Brahmanas”. ^⁸7

But there is more. Even in its particular essence, Amidism is to be explained, at least in part, by an evolution of religious ideas, or of the religious sentiment inside India. If it be acknowledged that contacts with the Iranian world could have had in its preparation, even in its very constitution, a decisive influence, we can think at the same time that it was no doubt only in order to lead the devout tendency of Buddhism to render itself concrete in the cult of Amitabha (in that of Maitreya also). Now this tendency existed prior to these contacts, and it is useless to look for a root for it outside Indian soil. From before the Christian era, the powerful movement of Bhikti, which was to find its most perfect expression in the Bhagavad-Gita, was powerful in India and “about the beginning of our era it had gained greatly in strength”. ^⁸8 If it blossomed principally in the cult of Vishnu-Krishna, the adherents of Buddhism did not all remain strangers to it (although Hindu Bhakti had to be given for object the “avatars” of divinity, while in Amidism, instead of being addressed to earthly Buddhas like Sakyamuni, it is turned towards beings practically wholly “heavenly”.). We observe a parallel development of Amidism and Vishnuism. Our three fundamental Sutras are a little the Buddhist counterparts of the Bhagavad-Gita, which is nearly their contemporary (second century). In the latter, the God Krishna explains to his devotee that men, in this kaliyuga, have become too feeble to be guided by the Vedas: “Give up”, he concluded, “all the ancient ways of salvation, and find in me alone your refuge! I shall deliver you from every evil; put an end to all your trouble!” ^⁸9 Krishna thus supplants all the other divinities of Brahmanism, as Amitabha supplants Sakyamuni. Doubtless Amida is no more an Isvara than a deva: the resemblance is therefore not perfect, far from it; it is not perfect either in the systems of ideas, or in the reciprocal emotional nuances. We do not any-the-less find ourselves in the presence of an analogy, for which a selfsame fundamental evolution is able to provide an explanation, as regards essentials, on both sides. “Indian religions must be explained by one another, for if they have undergone many alien influences, they have much more constantly and profoundly communicated among themselves.” ^⁹0

Besides, united with the idea of the “field of action” (ksetra), the principle of the “transfer of merits” (parinamana) was at the very least latent in Buddhism from the first. It was not belated in becoming explicit, and it can be said that the final form taken by this explicitness was precisely Amida’s Vow in forty-eight points. ^⁹1 Most assuredly, the enthroning of this Amida “remains mysterious”. It is none-the-less certain, whatever can be said of this or that alien influence or of one or another ingredient, western or Indian, that in a general way the Mahayana, to which Amidism belongs, is in profound continuity with primitive Buddhism. ^⁹2 Despite certain appearances, which in truth have an important place, it remains close to the more sober Buddhism of the Hinayana, and the forces which may have acted on it have not done as much as might be thought to swerve its inner logic. ^⁹3 Perhaps the two following chapters will help us to see this.

In the present case, however, more than in any other, the question arises. In the final reckoning, is this religion of Buddha Amida in conformity with the spirit of Buddhism? Are not the Sutras which lay its foundation, and still more the men who have belatedly interpreted these Sutras, going on the contrary, in inviting man “to rely solely on the magnificently efficacious help of the divinity”, so far as to effect a “radical change”, a complete reversal of Sakyamuni’s teaching? ^¹ Has not a new ideal finished by triumphing, involving a new conception as to the way of salvation? ^² Are not the kind religion and easy way of the Tariki decidedly irreconcilable with the austere and long discipline of the Jiriki? “Is not the spirit of awakening” (Bodaishin), which essentially constitutes the Buddhist, adulterated when it is assimilated to “the spirit of faith”? ^³ Still more, when it has been declared, as in the Jodo-Shin, that this “spirit of faith” is the spirit of awakening par excellence, the Daibodaishin? ^⁴ Even after having pointed out, as we did at the beginning, the characteristics which previously announced or prepared for it in the first Buddhism, must not we acknowledge that its practice is exactly contrary to Buddha’s exhortation: “Lead a holy life to put an end to suffering” and his final recommendation; “Be yourselves your own lamp and own refuge?” ^⁵

It has sometimes been thought so, not without plausibility, or even without some truth. That Buddhism “does not belong”, Father Leon Wieger wrote for example. ^⁶ It is a “pseudo-Buddhism”, stated Father Henri Dore. ^⁷ It has been seen as a sketch of the Christian religion. Paul Claudel said one day: “The Amida of China and Japan is almost Christian.”. ^⁸

Without any doubt, indeed, in the number of its adherents, Amidism is practically “a true theism”. It is for them a “religion of grace”, although not properly of redemption. “The stellar map of the domains of the Buddhas matters little to these common people; universal Buddhahood matters little to them . . . They are unacquainted with all these theories.” The place which they give to Amida in their heart is practically unique and the rebirth anticipated by them in his Pure Land is scarcely distinguished in their eyes from a definitive salvation^⁹: “an eternal solstice, where the day will never set, noon brightness, springtime temperature, summer’s charm, autumn’s abundance and, not to overlook anything, the quietude and leisure of winter! A place all of light, peace and perfection! A place where they adore the boundless light!” ^¹0 To judge not only by the texts, but a long living observation, it can also be said that many Amidists do “acts of contrition and love, which are very beautiful”. “Their morality is extraordinarily pure.” “Nothing has ever resembled Christian prayer as much as” their prayer. They pray “humbly, fervently, from the very heart”; their attitudes are “natural and touching”. “Never in my life shall I forget”, Father Wieger has further written, “the feeling I experienced while contemplating a young Amidist mother, making her devotions before the illumined and empty throne. She first shut her eyes and concentrated deeply, her lips murmuring the act of repentance and request. Then she set before the throne two small children, the second of whom could scarcely walk, and who, perfectly trained, did in the most earnest manner what their mother had done. Finally she drew from her bosom the third, a young baby, took his head delicately between thumb and forefinger, and bent it towards the throne . . .” ^¹1

In truth, with these “common people” of Amidism, ignorant of doctrinal subtleties, the Christian can well have the impression “of being at home”.^¹2 He can indeed hope, with the missionaries who have lived among them, that their acts of worship and petition, across the formulas taught to them, go “direct to the God of conscience, to the only true God, to the Father of all souls” and the words of the Apostle Paul recur to his memory, on those men who seek God, “si forte attrectent cum aut inveniant, quamvis non longe sit ab unoquoque nostrum”. ^¹3 He is only the more struck, however, by the nebulous unreality in which the entire object of their faith is submerged.

We are not speaking here in the name of the Christian faith, but as a human observer. What is their story of the Vow of Amitabha? ^¹4 And what is this Amida himself? What is this phantasmagoria of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas in which he figures? What, finally is all this great machinery, half mythological, half metaphysical, of the Mahayana? He who adheres to the Christian mystery does not have either, it is true, direct evidence. His adhesion is an act of faith. At least he trusts to precise, dated, explicit testimonies, whose value he is enabled to appreciate. But here, what shadow of a guarantee do we find? We cannot even appeal vaguely for it to Sakyamuni’s authority, for it is too evident that, despite the constant care which they show to be connected with him, the works in which all these marvels are to be read have nothing to do with the Sakyamuni of history. The objection of the Hinayanists remains invincible: “Show us in our canon”, the author of the Kathavatthu said to the Mahayanists, “the name and tradition of these Buddhas whom you wish to impose on us!” The expedient of the “extensions” or mystical fissures introduced into the thread of our common life without the profane perceiving them, is plainly able to convince only those who are already converted to the preaching of our Sutras. When one has patiently investigated the origins, and, bit by bit, drawn up an inventory of the dossier of Amidism taken on its own word, whatever the scantiness of the results obtained, and whatever the obscurities which remain, one is sure, in any case, of having analysed, beautiful perhaps though it be, only a grand dream.

The contrast in situation with the Christian revelation is more profound. For Christ does not profess to be, as does the herald of Amida, the announcer of a fabulous history and an imaginary Heaven. He is, he says himself, in his humanity the Image of the invisible God. He is his own witness to himself. He presents himself - we continue to speak as a simple observer - as the object of the faith which he preaches. Even that which, from him, must be believed, is not without roots in our human soil, and the most unbelieving account, if it is not inaccessible to spiritual values, cannot fail to enter into a kind of admiring, helpless amazement before some great acts, in each of which the Christian newness is expressed: such as, following close upon the preaching, so brief, and the death of Christ, the extraordinary sloughing of what Christians name the Old Testament in the New Testament; such again as the immediate interpretation of the Fact of Christ effected by those two geniuses of a type entirely apart, St. Paul and St. John. The historian can also indeed patiently seek out the origin, more or less remote, of each of the elements which were employed by these two great interpreters or their emulators, and at first by Jesus himself, in order to encompass the traits of his figure and divine work. He can discover one by one the various human sources of all this stock of ideas, images and, if you like, myths. But whatever the result of his work of analysis, one essential fact that Christ has, the most really, the most historically, the most incontestably in the world, produced on some of those who saw him and conversed with him, or who discerned the prodigious commotion produced deep in hearts through his passing, an impression so powerful, that those men have not had too much of all this stock of ideas, images and myths, to try to make understood what he was in himself and for us. ^¹5

There is nothing in Buddhism which really resembles this Fact of Christ. It is a matter here of a unique fact, the most tangible of facts - the documents which yield it to us in its complexity are still all bubbling with a contagious life - at the same time as the most charged with ontological density; of a fact, furthermore, in relation to which, in the Christian vision of the universe, everything is ordered, hierarchically arranged and, so to speak, valorised in taking its exact proportions. The thoughtful Buddhist believes in no such thing, and does not feel the need to believe in any such thing. His spiritual life rests on wholly other principles. Also this is only a contrast that we are sketching, and not a refutation. But it is permissible, without abandoning the hope that we have mentioned, to experience a feeling of sadness in thinking of these “common people” of Amidism whose belief is in fact such a deception. ^¹6

In thinking again of many of them, we can also think that Amidism was on many occasions of quite mediocre quality. The disdain with which a number of Buddhists have overwhelmed it is not all intellectual disdain. It often became in the course of centuries, principally in China, a simple and popular cult, which had no longer much Buddhistic about it, and as well could often be hardly worthy of the name of religious. With it, mythology took precedence of spirituality, imagination of interiority. Without refining on universal suffering and without concerning themselves about a Nirvana too pure and subtle, many have quite simply sought the continuation of existence close to the Buddha of long life (Amitayus, Wou-liang-cheou-Fo), as others beside them sought it close to the Queen of the West (Si-wang-mou), “original Breath of the Great Yin”. Both groups were greedy for the same “peaches of immortality”. The Pure Land of the first and the Paradise of the Immortals of the second had become interchangeable; their respective origins, Buddhist and Taoist, were no more than a matter for the learned. ^¹7

Pure religion or superstition, soaring of the soul or defeat of the spirit, spiritual progress in a sense which would bring it close to Christianity or simple “deviation” from the old Buddhist ideal through the effects of “intellectual indolence” and “weakness of religious conscience”^¹8, it is a fact in any case that Amidism has been able to respond, whatever the quality of this response, to certain aspirations of the human soul which classical Buddhism ignores, disdains or mortifies. Now these same aspirations are taken into Christianity, which ratifies while transmuting them. Certain historians have even explained in this way the small success which Christian preaching met with in the regions of Japan where the Jodo was most firmly established: as if, in advance, the place had been taken. ^¹9 For China, as we saw in the preceding chapter, missionaries have proposed an analogous explanation.

But whatever the case may be with popular Amidism, the theory, known to cultivated minds, is certainly less simple. It is very different and is going to take us very far from Christianity. Two things, however, could mislead us here. On the one hand, we must take into account the practical necessity which every translator faces of rendering by the words of our religious vocabulary, entirely impregnated with Christian ideas, formulas whose meanings or at least whose harmonies are never quite the same. “There is nothing so fallacious as this transposition of the terms of one religion to another.” ^²0 On the other hand, more than one modern Amidist, notably in the Shin-Shu sect, has undergone Christian influences or endeavoured, speaking for Westerners, to present his faith by way of Christian analogies. Some call Amida “Creator” and “Father”, or else explain his role according to the idea of salvation through Jesus Christ.^²1

At the beginning of this century, a propaganda work, the Shinshu hyakywa, presented an Amidism very modernized and all tinged with Christianity. ^²2 The Bonze Tada Kanai, about 1910, thoroughly pushed this tendency. ^²3 In 1926, M.J. Takakusu spoke to us of “St. Shinran”.^²4

Still in the same sect, another author, Hyakuzo Kurak showed the source of the religion in the fact that he who loves cannot remain alone but aspires to be united to an eternally beloved being. ^²5 Yet another expressed his satisfaction at meeting in the gospels many traits coinciding, he said, with the ideal of his own faith, etc. ^²6 Most often this is a matter of only a superficial glaze, and the parallels which would be really significant are illusory. Not less illusory are the analogies imagined by some comparatists, such as Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, in a spirit of universal concordism. To compare, for example, Amitabha with the “Father” who draws us to Him, Sakyamuni to the “Son” whom He has sent to us, Avalokitesvara to the “Holy Spirit” through whom He is accessible to us, is not shed any light: it is on the contrary to confuse everything. ^²7 It finally comes about, it seems, that in reporting the sayings of the most celebrated Amidists, certain European translators let themselves be influenced, albeit unconsciously, by one or another evangelical saying, in the mould of which they naturally shape their sentence.

These considerations incite us to caution. Moreover, Amidist writers consider themselves to react, and we cannot set their testimony aside. Through the doctrine which founds it, the cult of Amida assumes a signification which takes from it all essential resemblance to the Christian religion ^²8 - at the same time however as it makes of it quite another thing than a vulgar religion or a simple agglomeration of superstitions. This cult thus recovers its place inside Buddhism; it re-enters Buddhist orthodoxy.

At first, the rigorous doctrine of karma, despite appearances, remains intact. It is through the force of his own karma that the future Amitabha has projected his Western Paradise. Besides, a thing of more immediate importance, each person will benefit from it only in accordance with the law of his own karma. This is what Kia-t’sai explained very well, in the seventh Century:

“In the matter of salvation, the fact that some are able to think of Amida and invoke him, and others not, is a consequence of anterior karma. If a being’s karma does not allow him salvation when death comes, all efforts to save this being will be in vain. Even Buddha Amitabha is powerless to save him. For one does not draw water from a dry straw, and one does not kindle the wet straw.

“Every awakening of conscience is the effect of karma. If, on his death bed, an exhorted sinner willingly implores Amitabha’s protection, that comes to him from a reserve of good karma acquired in his prior existences: he is ripe. Whereas if a sinner, likewise exhorted, does not understand and does not want, it is because he is not yet ripe.” ^²9

Reflections doubtless in conformity with the most prevalent good sense, based on a too common experience. But this dry straw from which Amida himself cannot draw water scarcely resembles those desert stones from which the all-powerful God is able to raise up when He so pleases sons to Abraham, and the spiritual universe dominated by the idea of maturation is scarcely compatible either with the one who gives a place of honour to the sudden invasions of converting grace. Nothing in it brings to mind, nothing in it allows what the Psalmist names “the change of the Right Hand of the Most High”. ^³0 In Amidism as everywhere else in Buddhism, if one can apparently “cheat” karma, even that is still a product of karma. To change a man’s karma is the first of the three things which no Buddha can do. ^³1 No fissure, therefore, in this iron law. And from where could a veritable forgiveness come to the sinner?

The doctrine explained so clearly by Kia-ts’ai finds a perfect warranty in the teaching of the great Nagarjuna, who wrote in his Treatise on the Perfect Wisdom:

Question: If the Buddha, once having entered the state of concentration (samadhi) of the Lion’s Play, proceeds in such a way that the damned, ghosts, animals and eight other difficult conditions are liberated and reborn in the abode of the Caturmaharajikas Gods, and even in that of the Paranirmitasavartins, is there still any need to acquire merits and practise goodness in order to obtain the fruit of reward?

Answer: We have said above that the beings of great merit have seen the rays of the Buddha and thus found salvation; those whose transgressions and defilements were profound only arrived at understanding at the moment when the earth quaked. When the sunrise lights up a lotus pool, the ripe lotuses at once open, while the young shoots do not yet open; likewise, when the Buddha casts his rays, beings of accomplished merit and sharpened knowledge immediately attain liberation, whereas others, etc. When a fruit-tree is shaken, the ripe fruit fall first, etc. ^³2

Always this idea of maturation, associated with the idea of karma. Honen, it is true, appears to contest them, in a reply which Shunjo reports, and that shows once more his tendency to escape from the circle in which Buddhist principles hold him enclosed. But in him this is only a practical tendency, and the theory is not shaken by it. Indeed, if we look closely into the matter, we perceive that he refuses only to admit that rebirth, fruit of the Nembutsu, is the fruit of merits acquired in prior existences; on the Nembutsu itself considered as a fruit, he is silent. ^³3 Hence we do not see that he is opposed to what T’an-louan said: “If certain people do not have the strength or deliberate lucidity to invoke Amida at their death, that has to be, their karma being taken into account: they are not yet ripe”. T’an-luan concluded: “Karma is a brute force, which does not tolerate any benign interpretation.” ^³4

It is therefore not without a little of the bad faith inherent in all propaganda, or at least not without the use of some reservation in the exposition of the truth, that the author of the Sutra of the Meditation of Amitayus represented Sakyamuni as saying, at the moment of completing his work: “O Ananda, this Sutra can also be called the Sutra on the total removal of the obstacle of karma (karmavarana-visuddhi).” The Long Sutra was more sincere when, after the explanations given by Sakyamuni on the condition of the inhabitants of Sukhavati, it had Ananda say: “O Blessed One! The maturation of acts and the recompense of acts, that passes understanding!” ^³5 Such a focussing carry us very far, despite first appearances - and despite the persistence of certain similarities on the plane of concrete psychology - from the Lutheran doctrine. They carry us no less far from the Catholic theology of merit and grace, salvation through redemption, repentance and hope. Amida does not say, like the God of the Bible:

He never said veritably to any sinner, like Jesus: “Go, your sins are forgiven you.” ^³7

Every Amidist also knows well, even if he is without culture, that his Buddha is not a God in any sense whatever, and not one has the notion of calling him God in the sense which the Christians give to this name. Nor is there any who makes of him a mediator between God and men; not even an Isvara, a “Lord”, in the Hindu sense of the word. Not one is entirely ignorant of the story which a very popular Sutra relates of him, the story of the Vow that he expressed, long before becoming a Buddha, at the time when he was called Dharmakara. This Vow was supported on the innumerable anterior merits whose projecting energy did not depend on any divinity, so that the Pure Land and the right of entry for each person are, on this score again, wholly ruled by karma, although freely interpreted thanks to the “transfer of merits”. In this regard, the case of Amida is the same as that of Sakyamuni, who also accumulates “during hundreds of thousands of aeons” an “abundant store of roots of good”, in order to benefit by it those who are “devoted to him”:

Amida is therefore no exception to all the beings about whom it is exclaimed with astonishment: “These great sovereign Buddhas have been flies and grubs!” ^³9

If he is somewhat reflective, every Amidist knows well, besides, that the Western Paradise, taken literally, is not yet Liberation. It is attained only, as Nagarjuna previously said, as a sure stage - in the career of the Bodhisattva, each Bhumi marks a stage - when the karma with which one is affected does not yet incline to complete illumination. ^⁴0 “It is a hard undertaking”, said Honen, “to become a Buddha; but it is easy to be born in the Pure Land”. ^⁴1 Doubtless such a Paradise is not a wretched dream in the manner of the Svargas, one of those dreams from which one will have to be awoken one day by suddenly finding oneself in an inferior condition again. It is not either like the Palace of Brahma, which is burnt up with the world each time the world is burnt up, at the end of the kalpa.^⁴2 But if the Long Sutra tells us in one place, in an emphatic manner, that its inhabitants are as happy as a Bhikshu who has just attained Nirvana, it specifies almost immediately that this happiness comes to them from the fact that their hope is henceforward firm and untroubled. ^⁴3 If therefore rebirth in the Pure Land is an incomparable advantage for the faithful man, it is less through the joys that it bestows on him than through the certitude it brings him. He knows that henceforward, in his advance to Nirvana, there will be no more regression: “O Sariputra, of all the beings who are born in Sukhavati, not one will backslide any more.” ^⁴4 Even he who sojourns on earth again to help in the salvation of others, will not be caught up anew in the cycle of birth and death. ^⁴5 He has indeed finished with this wearying course through the three worlds and the five destinies, with these illusive ascents up to the ethereal regions of the Arupyadhatu, followed by fresh falls down to the gloomier abodes of the Kamadhatu. ^⁴6 Distant as he may yet be, the goal no longer ceases to be in sight.

This enables us to understand more fundamentally how easily fallacious are the comparisons attempted between the thought of the Amidist masters and the thought of a Luther, as indeed with any other witness for Christian thought. No doubt, the simplification of the religious apparatus, the total trust in Amida, the deliverance from the anguish of sin, and among the extreme Amidists, the rejection of works, of monachism and contemplation, find very exact parallels in our own religious history. Doubtless also, it is easy to comment on the nembutsu by the words of Joel: “Whoever will invoke the Name of the Lord will be saved”, or by those of St. Paul: “If your lips avow that Jesus is Lord . . . you will be saved”; it is easy to apply to the opposition of the Jiriki and the Tiriki the teaching of the third chapter of the Epistle to the Romans on justification by faith. ^⁴7

None of that is unimportant. This essential fact forgotten however, that the principal occupation of Amida, in the centre of the Land where he reigns, is to preach.

According as in the faith of the Buddhists of China, Sakyamuni gave way or was dimmed before Amitabha, the Assembly of the Law changed into Paradise. Nevertheless this Paradise has never ceased to be still an Assembly of the Law. The Happy Land still corresponds to Vultures Peak. It also corresponds to the Tusita heaven, where Maitreya delivers the Law under the tree of dragon flowers. The three Amidist Sutras are as explicit and also insistent as possible on this subject. The Buddhas of the four cardinal points, like those of the intermediate points, do not cease to preach in the entire world. Amitayus is an Arhat, and he preaches. ^⁴8

And the main occupation of the beings assembled around him is to be taught. In this regard, we must also avoid pressing too far the comparisons which we evoked with the paintings of a Fra Angelico or the poems of a St. Ephraim. They could be usefully corrected by appealing to another Christian work, the Roman mosaic of Saint Pudentienne^⁴9; the place where Christ is sitting is in some sort intermediary between the heaven of eternity, depicted in the upper part, and the mountain of the Beatitudes; already Christ is seated in the majesty of his glory, but he still teaches beings on the path; his Apostles, who surround him, are already of the elect, the first two among them have already received the crown, and nevertheless they still learn and prepare to preach in their turn the Gospel to the world. . .

But, as this unique masterpiece differs completely, in style and composition, from the frescoes of Sukhavati, the respective themes of the two preachings, that of Christ and that of Amida, also completely differs.

We know the message of Christ, which is summed up wholly in Him. What does Amida preach, for his part, if not universal Buddhism, eternal Buddhism? He no longer applies himself to hold on him the mind of his listeners, he no longer tells them that the spirit of awakening is concentrated in the spirit of faith, he no longer asks them for an act of devoted trust in his person: that is all accomplished, and has borne its fruit. But they are not at the end for all that. Now that they are here assembled in his mystical school, he delivers to them a teaching whose object goes beyond him. He gives way before the Doctrine. The Canonical Texts tell it to us: he explains in their profoundest signification the three Jewels, the Four Noble Truths, the five supernatural faculties, the six Perfections, the seven degrees of knowledge, the Eightfold Path (path of eight branches), the twelve divisions of the Scriptures, the way of Nirvana. His two great attendants and all the other Bodhisattvas aid him in his task. As soon as a lotus half-opens its flower on the sacred lake, the soul which rises from it sees them before her who expound to her at once the mysteries of “the wonderful law”. ^⁵0 To his preaching, the heavenly birds, swans, curlews, peacocks, regularly lend their assistance: three times each day and three times each night, they give together an instructive concert. Their song, resounding in the soul, causes to arise in it the recollection of Buddha, Dharma, Sangha. The music of the waters itself, a music “melodious and pleasing”, arising from all the rivers, does not cease to proclaim the great carrier words of supreme peace: “suffering, impermanence, impersonality, (an-atman), void (vacuity), calm, Nirvana”.^⁵1

Finally, despite the little philosophical development he may have, the more thoughtful Amidist knows in addition that the Amida whom he invokes keeps up for the time being the aspect of a personal saviour only for the vulgar, and is in reality, like all the other Buddhas, only a relative manifestation of the Absolute. He knows that in this Absolute, in this “Everlasting” - it is one of the names of Nirvana, and it is also used to designate Amida ^⁵2 - the paradise and its Buddha are no longer distinguished from one another. ^⁵3 Doubtless the Christian himself says something analogous. Without needing for this any training in technical reflection, he has only to give himself over to the movement of his faith and hope. He then proclaims, with Origen or Ruysbroeck, that all Heaven is for him in Christ, because Christ is himself this Kingdom of which He is King, himself the Tree of Life, himself the “living Paradise”. ^⁵4

With the legion of mystics, he refuses to receive from God any good separated from this sole good which is God himself. ^⁵5 With Hadewijch, the Flemish mystic, he sees Him who is enthroned in the heavens make only one with those heavens. ^⁵6 He sets his dwelling place, with Surin^⁵7, in “the limitless space, the immensity of being which is God”. He exclaims with Bossuet^⁵8: “O Eternity, you are only in God, but rather, O Eternity, you are very God!” Like the Buddhist again, the Christian knows that the Absolute, free from everything, pervades everything, “present everywhere like the subtle fire”. ^⁵9 but the resemblance, here also, is deceptive. For in the one case and in the other, we see immediately, the direction of the thought is contrary. In Christianity, indeed, it is so to speak heaven which is absorbed into God. The “Paradise of God” gives way finally, like a final theophany, before the “God of Paradise”: “prôton men Paradeisos, O Theos”. ^⁶0 In Buddhism on the contrary, it is the Buddha who, in so far as being distinct and personal, is reabsorbed into an Absolute transcending all knowledge and letting itself be somewhat described allusively only in terms of void and space. ^⁶1 The “King of the Dharma” (Dharmaraja) gives way before the sphere or place of the Dharma (Dharma-dhatu). As Noritake Tsuda says, if the vulgar honour Amida as the Lord of Pure Land, localised somewhere, very far off, in the West, he who is not content with these fancies understands that the personage of Amida is only the symbol or the incarnation of Light and Eternity. ^⁶2

Up to the limit of mystical aspirations and thought, the personalism of the Christian faith is affirmed and triumphs. For the Christian, Eternity is one of the names of God, like Truth or Justice; for the Buddhist, and for the Amidist himself, it does not turn out thus, even when these names appear interchangeable with the name of a Buddha: for the meaning of the relationship is otherwise. “No original Buddha! No unique Buddha!” This cry of Asanga, the leader of the mystical Yogacara school, is that of Amidism as well. “No creator God!” Amidism repeats after its two Indian patriarchs, Nagarjuna and Vasubandhu. That is why, when he pronounces the sacred name, the inner attitude of the thoughtful Amidist is not the same as that of the Christian in prayer, and the words of prayer and invocation, which we have used like everybody else, express this attitude only in a very approximate manner. ^⁶4 We have to do with two spiritual universes which do not meet.

In short, when Amida appears in his personal aspect, he is, by his origin and role, only a being essentially like all of us, and one can speak, in recalling the story of his “original vow”, of the euhemerism in which the Pure Land Sutras, like so many other Mahayanist Sutras, take delight. When, on the contrary, he takes on vaster proportions, becomes a supernatural being and seems to begin to put on a divine dignity, it is only to vanish at last like a phantom and to dissolve into a cosmical principle in the midst of which his personality is not sublimated but abolished. This principle is indeed, like the Zeus of the orphic verse, “the beginning, middle and end” of everything, but it is so void, so evanescent, that we are not astonished that the former missionaries, seeking the analogy which would enable them to grasp it, have designated it as the materia prima of their own philosophy. Aristotle himself had translated thus the Apeiron of Anaximander. He had not in this way done justice to the thought of his predecessor, and the Catholic missionaries did not render entire justice either to the endeavour of Buddhist thought. Perhaps however the error in interpretation of these missionaries was, all things considered, less than that of Aristotle. ^⁶5

The fact, in any case, is evident: to the degree that we enter into the underlying doctrine of Amidism, we see disappearing into it all truly essential differences from the other forms of the Mahayana, while between Christianity, and it the gap becomes wider in proportion. This will become clearer still if we give our attention to some aspects of the thought of the Amidist masters which up till now have been able to remain in shadow, especially in what has to do with the true relation between Amida and his faithful.

When the learned Monk Kosai, expelled as we have seen from the original community of the Jodo-Shu, founded in 1204 the ephemeral sect called “of the sole thought”, he conceived this thought not as a simple emanation of the soul aspiring to a concrete, personal and living being, but as the taking consciousness, by itself definitive, of an intimate identity with the original Amida, the absolute Amida, that is, with the hidden principle of which the represented or imaged Amida was only the symbol or means to an end: with the “primordial intelligence which fills the universe and exists in the heart of all living beings”; in short, with very Buddhahood. That, in Kosai, was a heritage from the Tendai sect to which he had at first belonged and whose syncretism and immanentist tendency we have noted. But we must not think this case unique. In fact, despite Honen’s reprobation, in the very century which followed his death, the same “heresy” was revived. For Ippen Shonin, Founder of another dissident sect, the Ji-Shu, “The Namu Amida Butsu is itself rebirth, and this rebirth is non-birth”; it is useless therefore to seek further or higher: “There is only the name of the Buddha Amida, and beyond it there exists neither him who pronounces it nor him whom this name designates. Beyond it there is no rebirth. All things are qualities included in the body of the very name of the Buddha.” ^⁶6

Kosai and Ippen were both considered heretics. The second was stamped by Zen, as the first by the Tendai. Both however only made explicit a thought which was absolutely peculiar neither to the Tendai nor Zen. It was previously that of Ryonin, the founder of the Yuzumen-Butsushu. And this thought is found as well, although usually less formally expressed there, in the Shin-Shu. The great seat founded by Shinran is distinguished above all, we have seen, by its exclusive cult of Amida, the radicalism of its faith, its passionate negation of every kind, of every shadow of “self power”. But if we look at it closely, we perceive that these traits so marked are of value only for the practical order and on the plane of relative truth. Thus it is that, according to the explanations of Rennyo Shonin, founded on those of Zonkaku (1290 - 1373), the invocation of Amida alone implies the invocation of all the Buddhas, who all have in him their common source, and not only all the Buddhas, but all the Shinto divinities, since these are in reality Buddhas; such is the reason, added Rennyo why the cult practised in the Shin-Shu is a true national cult; its apparent exclusiveness is not negative, but on the contrary fully comprehensive, and if the devotee of Amida is not to invoke any other, it is because all the others are present in Amida alone. Let us also recall that, for Shinran himself, the Pure Land is not distinct, in reality, from Nirvana. It is not a stage towards illumination, but very illumination. Now the latter is by no means transferred to the future: it is produced in the very act of the nembutsu. “There is no need”, taught Shinran, “for you to wait for the last moment of your existence for a numerous assembly of Buddhas to descent to welcome you.” Trust in the original Vow is infallible, since the blessed rebirth is none other than the trusting heart itself. Through the effect of the invocation of Amida in a sentiment of compassion which writes with his, the “Supreme Truth” is attained, which is none other than the unsubstantiality of the Buddha and beings apparently profane (Butsubonittai). ^⁶7

It was in conformity with this teaching of the founder that some faithful followers of the sect declared, in the sixteenth Century, before those who wanted to attract them to the Christian faith: “In putting our trust in the Vow made by Amida, we hope in this life to attain salvation and become Buddhas.” ^⁶8 And this is also why the modern theoraticians and apologists of the Shin-Shu can, without falsifying the doctrine, set themselves to show that this religion of salvation is at the same time, like all Buddhism, a religion of illumination, and that the affirmation so distinct and exclusive of “other power” is not in any way opposed, properly understood, to the recognition of a “self power”. Just as Nirvana is none other, in absolute truth, than Samsara, so, still in absolute truth, the Tariki is none other than the Jiriki, and even there is no other way of affirming the Jiriki in all its definitive force than by professing the Tariki. The “original Vow” is not an external and temporal act, it is the expression of a profound will, which is not different from mine. Therefore the more I entrust myself to the sole power of the Buddha Amida, the more I really base myself on my own power and will, the sole one which is truly mine beyond my illusory personality, in the ultimate, timeless region, in which the particularities of Amida disappear like mine in order to make room for our identity in the absolute.

This kind of dialectical reversal, this transition from the same into the other, founded on the doctrine of the planes of truth, is frequent in Buddhism. Nowhere perhaps is it more paradoxical than in Shinran’s posterity, because the apparent opposition between the two contraries which we are about to see identified with each other does not exist only on the plane of ideas, but on the plane of the most concrete and deeply engaged spiritual life. We must, however, indeed admit it as a fact. “The ultimate belief which justifies the teaching of the Shin-Shu”, says for example M. Gesho Sasaki, “has without doubt nothing to do with an objectivism nor with a subjectivism”, for it posits “the truth of a concrete synthesis in the I and the Thou in the illumined spirit (enlightened mind) of the Buddha”; the I and the Thou are in reciprocal inclusion. ^⁶9 And M.D.T. Suzuki, quoting an ancient work of the sect: “Amida and ourselves are united so as to form a single one; the one cannot be separated from the other, even for a moment, so that each of our thoughts is a thought of Amida, and each of our breaths is emitted by his virtue. Let us be separate even while being one, and let us be one in the separation, or to speak in more personal terms, let Amida be his own saviour, in saving others; here in truth is the mystery of mysteries.” “Psychologically”,

M. Suzuki says further, “the assurance on the part of living beings of being the objects of the original Vow, is identical with the enlightenment on the part of Amida himself. Such is the idea which is at the base of the doctrine of the Tariki. In this doctrine, the enlightenment attained by oneself, as the Buddhists of former generations understood it, has taken the form of faith in an enlightenment of Amida.” ^⁷0

Can it be said that it was precisely Shinran who had disquieted the keepers of the orthodoxy of the Jodo? Would not they have scented, so to speak, in his attitude the shaking of belief in a real Amida, in a real Pure Land, in a real soul of each person? Were they not right to distrust a showy objectivism which was at bottom only the most daring of subjectivisms, and is not the party of the Ryukwans and the Shokobus thus justified in having expelled Shinran, in order to preserve in its simplicity the faith which they held from Honen? - But in reality the case of the Jodo itself is not unlike the case of the Jodo-Shin. Ryoyo Shozei, who was at the beginning of the sixteenth Century the seventh successor of Honen, explained emphatically that the transfer of the soul to paradise, its rebirth in a lotus, and all the other details, are only figures of speech; in fact, he said, neither the beings of the nine categories, nor the venerable Saints, nor Amida himself are to be conceived as existing in the Pure Land, seeing that this is not a particular place: it is the symbol of the ultimate and absolute reality, it is the unique (sole) reality, everywhere present, so that we are able to be identified with it everywhere, wherever we are. ^⁷1

It is possible, true enough, to express the opinion that Ryoyo Shozei imparted a new orientation to the Jodo. But he was not without warrant. The fidelity of a Zennebo to the thought of Honen has never given rise to suspicion. Now Zennebo already professed a doctrine analogous to that of the Ryoyo Shozei, a doctrine which he expressed by using classical comparisons. “When a piece of dry wood catches fire,” he said, “the fire rapidly consumes the wood, and once all the wood has become embers, it can no longer be said whether it is fire or wood; it can be called fire quite as well as wood. The piece of dry wood is the image of mortal beings, incapable by themselves of any good work, capable only of committing

3 Leon Wieger, Controversies, (1934), p. 166; and Dictionary of Spirituality, f.x., (1945), art. China. C.B. Henri Bernard, S.J., in Collectaneae commissionis synodales, November 1934, pp. 859 - 860.

8 The Nestorian documents and relics in China, (Tokyo, 1937); The Nestorian Monument in China, (London, 1916). See also A. Mingana, The early spread of Christianity in Central Asia and the Far East, (Manchester, 1925).

1⁰ Jean Dauvillier, The Chaldean Provinces “on the outside” in the Middle Ages, in Ferdinand Cavallero Miscellanies, (1948), pp. 260 - 316. M Paul Pelliot has left an unpublished study (deposited in the Guimet Museum) on The Nestorian Inscription of Si-ngan-fou.

1² P.Y. Sacki, The Nestorian Monument. . ., pp. 148 - 153 and 156. A critical study by Toru Haneda, On the fragments of the two Nestorian scriptures in Chinese recently made known, in Tohogaku, I, (1951).

1³ C.B. Jean Dauvillier, loc. cit., p. 310, concerning two beams of the Horyuji (seventh Century) on which Sayce had pointed out inscriptions “related to Syrice” and accompanied by crosses: “but have we here Chaldean Christian crosses and are the characters Syrice?” These beams are not the present time in the Tokyo museum.

1⁵ Shu Osumi, History of Religious Ideas . . . of Japan, pp. 180 - 181. Hobogirin, III, p. 249, (art. Byo). Rev. Father Michel Ledrus on the Doctrinal Proselytism of Indian Buddhism. A.K. Reischauer, Studies . . ., p. 218.

1⁶ C.B. Dom Castagna, in Eighth Week of Missiology, (Louvain, 1930), p. 100; discussion of the report of Rev. Father Michel Ledrus on the Doctrinal Proselytism of Indian Buddhism. A.K. Reischauer, Studies . . ., p. 218.

1⁸ Declarations of a “Priest of foreign missions” in L. Delplace, Catholicism in Japan, vol. 1, (1909), pp. 60 - 61. C.B. Hobogirin, I and II, art. Bombai (or Bai) for the history of Buddhist psalmody in India, China and Japan. II, p. 103: “We know that under the six Dynasties and the Tô (T’ang), Chinese music sustained strong Western influences, and principally serindiennes”; whence doubtless “some analogies . . . ascertained between the psalmody of the Buddhists of Chinese civilisation and that which is in use . . . in the Christian Churches.”

2⁴ C.B. the missionary cited by L. Delplace, op. cit., pp. 60 - 61: “Three ranking Bonzes, employed in Honganji secretariat, assured me in 1885 that there was a copy of a book of the Gospel, written in Shinran Shonin’s hand.”

2⁵ Ibid: The sect founded by Shinran “does not belong to Buddhism, but is like a mimicry of Christianity . . . All the other sects charged it with this sufficiently at the Council (Kiodoshoku) in 1872; I still have the copy of it here in my hands.”

2⁸ C.B. A.C. Moule, Christians in China before the year 1550, (London, 1930), p. 36. P.Y. Sacki, op. cit., pp. 164 and 195. Charles Eliot, Japanese Buddhism, p. 395.

3⁰ Jean Filliozat, Indian Medicine and the Buddhist Expansion in the Far East, in Asiatic Journal, April - June 1934, pp. 301 - 307. For the ancient Indian period, we know as charitable initiatives only the wells, inns, trees beside roads, meant for the convenience of travellers, that Asoka’s Inscriptions attest.

3² Details and references in Coates, op. cit, pp. 172 - 176. On a fresco of Ajanta (first century at the latest), a kwanjo is represented: J. Griffith, Paintings in the Buddhist Cave Temples of Ajanta.

3⁴ Arthur Lloyd, Shinsen and his work, Studies in Shinshu Theology, (Tokyo, 1910); The Ophite Gnostics and the Pure Land, in Transactions. . . , vol. 1, (Oxford, 1908), pp. 132 - 136; The Wheat among the Tares. . . , p. 71. These four links would be: the two Gnostic (Basilidean) words, Abrexes and Caulacan (C.B. St. Ireneous, Adversus Hoareses, I.I, ch. 25), close to the word Kha-la-ka-va-a and its equivalent Abara-kakia, which can be read on a placard in certain funeral ceremonies in Japan; the resemblance between the thirteen Buddha guardians of the dead in the Shingon and the thirteen Kingdoms of the dead in Pistes Sophia; finally the resemblance and simultanity of appearance of Amidism and Christianity. The same fertility in the discovery of analogus and historical connections in E.A. Gordon; see, for example, Some Recent Discoveries in Korean Temples and their Relationship to Early Eastern Christianity, in Translations of the Korean Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. V, p. 1, 1914, pp. 1 - 39.

3⁵ Nor above all that there may well be links of kinship between Mahayanist speculation and Gnosticism or Neo-platonism. C.B. Alfred Foucher, The Old Road of India, vol. ii, (1947). H.H. Gowen, Japan, p. 89, etc. L. de la Vallee Poussin, however, resisted this opinion: The Siddhi of Hiuan-tsang, vol. 2, (1929), pp. 811 - 813.

3⁶ C.B. A. Foucher, op. cit., and Life of Buddha. It is not impossible either that the Christian use of hymns comes originally from the use Buddhism made of them from the second Century, and which Chinese Amidism was to develop; C.B. The Old Road of India, p. 298.

3⁷ Jean Dauvillier, loc. cit., pp. 355 - 356; The Evalgelization of Tibet in the Middle Ages by the Chaldean Church and the problem of the relations of Buddhism and Christianity, in Acts of the 21st Congress of Orientalists, (1949). C.B. J. Van Durme, Notes on Lamaism, loc. cit.

4³ C.B. the remarks, moderate moreover of G. Van der Lecuu on the saviour King and the formation, not of the idea of God or of faith in God, but of the representation of God: Religion in its Essence and in its Manifestations, (1949), pp. 97 and 123.

4⁵ Hinduism and Buddhism, vol. III, (1921), pp. 218 - 451, etc. Previously, E.J. Eitel, Handbook for the Student of Chinese Buddhism, (1870), pp. 6 - 7; La Mageliere, History of Japan, vol. 2, (1907), p. 141; Rhys Davids, etc.

4⁶ Essay on the Buddhist Paintings of Tuan-huang, loc. cit., p. 1404: “Amitabha, all radiant from those distant influences which mingle with the Persian God of the Sun the poetry of Buddhist beliefs . . .”

4⁸ Buddhism, p. 64, etc. The Iranian Influence in Greece and India, in Review of Brussels University, vol. 37. But Przyluski’s hypothesis is much vaster, and appears to use more venturesome.

4⁹ Paul Pelliot, Iranian Influences in Central Asia and the Far East, (1912). The Iranian influence appeared then “probable” to Mr Pelliot. Since then he has insisted more on the caution which is requisite: A Manichean Treatise discovered in Kan-Sou, (1926). C.B. Noel Peri, loc. cit., p. 224. L.H. Gray, Some Recent Studies on the Iranian Religion, Harvard Theological Review, vol. XV, (1922), p. 91.

5² Alfred Foucher, The Old Road of India, vol. 2, (1947), pp. 288 - 289. Albert Grunwedel, Mythology of Buddhism, p. 39: “a doctrine apparently derived form Persian fancies”.

5⁴ Jean Przyluski, Buddhism and Upanishad (with the collaboration of Etienne Lamotte, in Bulletin of the French School of the Far East, vol. 32, p. 168. Keith, Buddhist Philosophy, p. 221. Paul Mus, Barabudur, p. 578. G. Benveniste, The Indo-European Expressions of Eternity. Leon Wieger, Chinese Buddhism, (1910), p. 100, etc.

5⁵ C.B. Alfred Foucher, op. cit., pp. 286 - 287: “Before descending for the last time on earth in order to become the Buddha Sakyamuni, the Bodhisattva Svetaketu crowns with his own hand his heir presumptive, and “removing from his head his diadem, he crowns Maitreya with it”. This gesture has nothing Indian about it. The old Chinese translations of the text do not know it. The interpolation would denote an Iranian influence. See also Paul Mus, The Buddha in Regalia, pp. 268 - 270.

5⁸ Op. cit., pp. 95, 104 - 110 and 311 - 312. A few other indications useful though ancient in James Darmestater, Points of contact between the Mahabharata and the Shah-Nemah, in Asiatic Journal, January - February 1881.

6⁴ Giuseppe Tucci, Concerning Avalokitesvara, in Chinese and Buddhist Miscellanies, vol. 9, p. 207. One thinks likewise of the description of Sangala, Meninder’s capital, in the Milindapanka.

6⁵ Mahasudassana-suttanta (Digha nikaya, II, pp. 170 - 171) and Vinaya of the Mulasarvastivadin, in Jean Przyluski, The City of the Cakravastin, Babylonian influences on the Civilisation of India. (Rocznik Orientalisstyczny, vol. V, 1929, pp. 179 and 181). C.B. the Mahavastin, I, p. 194, an analogous description of Divapati, capital of the Cakravartin Arcinat (ibid., p. 180), etc.

6⁶ C.B. Jean Przyluski, The Seven Terraces of Barabudur, in Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, I, (1936), pp. 251 - 256. The last abode distinguished by the Aksyupanishad resembles the Buddhist Nirvana: “Deliverence without body, such is the seventh Bhumika; it is inaccessible to words, it is the calmed acme of all lands”. Id., Buddhism and Upanishad, loc. cit., Seven Bhumies also in the commentary on the Gita by Nilakantha (P. Foucaux, The Lalita-vistara, vol. 2, 1892, p. 5). In the Lotus, ch. III, the chariot of the Bodhisattvas is made of “seven precious substances”, etc. According to Asanga, Mahayanasamgraha, X, 10, (translated Lamotte, vol. II, 2, p. 317), citing the “Sutra in 100,000 articles of the basket of the Bodhisattvas”, the great palace of the Buddha is “ornamented with seven shining jewels”.

6⁷ Paul Mus, Barabudur, pp. * 109 - 100, 16 - 17, 320, 329 - 330. Other examples in Louis de la Vallee Poussin, India in the time of the Mauryas, pp. 18 - 21 and 160 - 161.

6⁹ Majjhima nikaya, (C.B. Paul Mus, ibid, pp. 925 - 928). Mircea Eliade, The Seven Steps of Buddha, (“Pro Regno pro Sanctuario”, Homage to G. Van Der Leeuw, Nijkerk, 1950, pp. 169 - 175), etc.

7⁰ Jean Przyluski, The Seven Terraces . . ., p. 256; The City of the Cakravastin, pp. 180 - 181. Like Ecbatana, Kapilavastu, natal city of the Buddha, is deemed to have had seven enclosing walls.

7² C.B. Franz Cumont, Inquiries into the funerary symbolism of the Romans, (1942), pp. 139 - 140; Monuments of the Mysteries of Mithra, vol. 1, pp. 38 and 309 - 310, etc. It does not seem either that the astrological conceptions carried by this scheme, become the pessimistic scheme of the seven planet-prisons, have ever been adopted in India.

7⁵ Nichiren was to write, much later: “To be reborn close to Brahma is to be reborn (by anticipation) on the Plane of the Buddhas” (Kaimokusho, in G. Renondeau, Nichiren’s Teaching, p. 197). The “felicity of Brahma” is equivalent to that of the “dhyana-lokas”, Heavens of the Rupadhatu and the Aryupadhatu.

7⁶ C.B. Alice Getty, op. cit., p. 38. Charles Eliot, Hinduism and Buddhism, II, p. 29; III, pp. 103, 220, 451. G. Tucci, loc. cit., pp. 218 - 219. The narrow way which leads the deceased soul to the Pure Land is also the parallel of the Cinvat bridge of Mazdeism.

7⁸ China across the Ages, Summary, 2nd edition, (1924), p. 101. A more reserved formula, p. 260: Amidism would be “a derivative of Mazdeism probably”. C.B. Louis Guillard, s.s., The Swastika cross in China, 2nd edition, (1904), p. 16: the cult of Amitabha “denotes the influence of the Gnostic ideas of Persia. These parallels give food for thought.”

7⁹ Art. China, loc. cit., col. 863: “Amidism has nothing, absolutely nothing in common with Mazdeism. Its genesis was in no way mysterious. It was on the contrary very logical . . .”

8² Jatakas (ed. Fausboell), I; p. 76. C.B. the Singalese traditions collected by Hardy, Manual . . ., pp. 179 - 180: The rays issued from the Buddha, “without even stopping an instant as short as a snap of the fingers, spread from world to world, resembling a blue cloud, a pink rock, a white robe, a red garland and a column of light; like this they continued to spread, for the joy of all creatures who saw the beauty of them.”

8⁴ Paul Mus, Barabudur, pp. 606 - 609, 712 - 714, * 151. C.B. p. * 268: “Buddhism did not integrate little by little, by chance and according to occasion, the various Buddhas with which faith finished by peopling infinity. It was freed at a given moment with the problem of naming series numerically well defined of positions of the Buddha to which the evolution of ideas rendered it desirable having personalised them, that a name be given: it had even become a necessity. Therefore any shift had to be resorted to. If ever an Iranian God of light and infinite time was able to be grafted on to the Buddhist tradition, it was under cover of this division of Sakyamuni into nameless Buddhas whom they wished to name. . .”

8⁶ C.B. Hans Oertel, Extracts from the Jaiminiya-Brahmana, in Journal of the American Or. Soc., XV (1893), pp. 234 - 238. A.K. Coomaraswamy, Elements of Buddhist Iconography, p. 49: The Kausitaki Upanishad, I, 3 - 5, describes Brahma’s throne as being “Amitaujas” (limitless splendour or power); “the name of the throne is equivalent to Amitabha, boundless light, and its nature, prana, is equivalent to Amitayus, unbounded life”; on the other hand, the appellation “Amitaujas” is applied to Indra in Rig-Veda, I, II, 4.

8⁷ Paul Mus, op. cit., p. * 47; C.B. pp. * 28, *143, etc. Let us note again that pre-Buddhist India was acquainted with ethereal genies, moving around in “flying palaces”. Id., Light on the Six Paths, p. 256.

9² C.B. A.K. Reischauer, op, cit., pp. 61 - 70. Jean Thomas, Prajnaparamita; in Traditional Studies, June 1950, p. 156. Sylvain Levi, India and the World, pp. 101 - 103. Paul Mus, Barabudur, I, pp. 23 - 29. Charles Eliot, Hinduism and Buddhism, III, p. 428. H. Hofinger, Study on the Council of Vaisali, (1946), p. 257.

9³ C.B. the conclusion of Miss de Mallman, op. cit., p. 312: “By the majority of his characteristics, Avalokitesvara is integrated above all into the great Buddhist currard of benevolence and charity.” We will say as much for Amidism in general.

4 Ibid, pp. 92 - 93. “The Shin sect has given a special value to the term Daibodaishin, which generally only adds to the idea of Bodaishin the value of superiority which the teaching of the Great Vehicle confers on it. According to Shinran, the Daibodaishin is a fourth Spirit of Awakening which is superposed on the three others: it consists in belief in the Transference of the power of the Vow of Amida . . .”

5 Digha nikaya, XVI, 2, 26. There in fact is a “strange contradiction with the teaching of Gautama”: Charles Eliot, Hinduism and Buddhism, vol. 3, p. 351. C.B. Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, The Development of the Pure Land Doctrine in Buddhism, loc. cit., p. 285: “How much of the Pure Land (Jodo) idea is deducible from the teaching of primitive Buddhism so called, or from the personality of Sakyamuni Buddha himself”?

1³ Acts, XVII, 27 - 28. C.B. L. Wieger, art. China, col. 863: “The Chinese Buddha is so dehumanized, so etherealized, so aureoled with divine attributes, that he blinds into the God of conscience, and is only an imprecise name to designate Him. . .” See too Thomas Ohm, Die Liebe zu Gott in den nichtchristlichen Religiones, (Munchen, 1950), pp. 281 - 287 and 458 - 459.

1⁴ We wonder what indeed signifies the question raised by M.D.T. Suzuki, Essays on Zen Buddhism, vol. 3, p. 196, of knowing what thought Amitabha had exactly in mind when he wanted his Name to resound through the whole universe. Is not this to drive the accommodation of language to the point of nonsense?

1⁶ Part of the contrast we are seeking to show can be evoked by these words of the Apostle John: “Quod manus nostrae contrectaverunt de Verbo vitas . . .”, (I Jo. I.I), or by those of Saint Bernard, Sermo de Aquaeductu: “Verbum caron fatum est, it habitat jem in nobis. Habitat in memoria nostra, habitat in cogitatione, quia usque and ipsam descendit imaginationem. . .”

1⁷ Henri Maspero, op. cit, pp. 66 and 78; Taoism, p. 36; and in Illustrated Asiatic Mythology, p. 237. C.B. Kokka, May 1912, p. 244: “It is doubtful how far such teaching found acceptance among the more intelligent people . . .”

1⁸ C.B. Paul Oltramare, Buddhist Theosophy, p. 424. A.K. Reischauer, op. cit., pp. 256 and 259. Ebisawa-Arimichi, Relation between the Ethics of Bushido and Christianity, in Cultural Nippon, vol. VII, (1939), p. 4: “In a word, the Buddhist devotees of those days actuated by their egoistic desires, sought to attain salvation only through the benevolence of Amida Buddha.”

1⁹ G.B. Sansom, The Western World and Japan, (1950), p. 133: “It seems that the Pure Land teaching satisfied some essential need of the times, which were full of hardship and danger, specially for those in the lower ranks of society, whose lives were wretched. It is perhaps significant that in those parts of Japan where the Jodo sect was most firmly established, there were few converts to Christianity, presumably because believers in Pure Land Buddhism found it a satisfying faith.”

2² C.B. Noel Peri, in Bulletin of the French School of the Far East, vol. XI, (1911), p. 223. G.B. Sansom, The Western World and Japan, pp. 477 - 478. H. H. Coates, op. cit., pp. XLIV - XLVIII, etc.

2⁷ Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Buddha and the Gospel of Buddhism, p. 248: “The parallel with some forms of Christianity is very close. Amitabha both “draws” men to himself and “sent” his son Gautama to lead men to him, and he is every accessible through the holy spirit of Avalokitesvara”, etc. Previously, R.F. Johnston, Buddhist China, (1913), p. 103. C.B. infra, note 63.

2⁸ Shidzutoshi Sugihira, The Pure Land Doctrine as illustrated in Shoku’s “Plain-wood” Nembutsu, in The Eastern Buddhist, vol. VI, 1932, p. 23: “It seems to us that there is a universal miscomprehension in the West concerning the nature of Pure Land Buddhism, interpreting it as a King of salvation in its Christian form, etc.”

2⁹ Translated Leon Wieger in Amidism. . ., p. 26 (seventh Century). Kia-t’sai only extends to prior existences, according to the doctrine universally received in Buddhism, the Law which Honen will recall to mind in order to put on guard impenitent sinners (C.B. supra, ch. VIII).

3¹ There are three things a Buddha cannot do: change or stop karma; save beings not destined to it; empty the world of all sentient beings. C.B. Charles Eliot, Japanese Buddhism, p. 388.

3² First Part, ch. 14 (translated Et. Lamotte, vol. I, pp. 479 - 480). C.B. the pseudo-Asvaghosa: “Those who invoke the Buddhas whole-heartedly as a consequence of their karma” (quoted supra, ch. 2).

3³ Shunjo, ch. 23, (pp. 430 - 431). Shunjo himself, relating the conversion of Sikaku, attributes it to the good karma inherited from a previous life: ch. 17, (p. 326).

3⁴ In L. Wieger, Amidism, p. 24. The first translator of the Sukhavativyuha concluded: “Everything in this world is the result of karma; a natural law, inevitable, inexorable, which rules all that exists between Heaven and Earth, a universal law, whose origin is a mystery” (ibid, p. 11). In the following translation made by Chu-k’ien, genies inscribe the reckoning of good and bad actions, as in the Treatises of the Tao: “a concession made to the Chinese surroundings”. (L. Wieger, p. 13). C.B. Henri Maspero, Taoism, (1950), p. 23).

3⁸ Mahakarmavibhanga, (translated S. Levi, p. 129). Shinran. C.B. the Atsumori Nô: (Through the power of the Vow of Amida) . . . Be it as deep as the sea under the rocky strand, the sin is expiated; withdrawn from the deep, the being becomes a Buddha, and the cause of his liberation is the merit of another existence . . . (translated Noel Peri, p. 147). The idea which is expressed in these texts combines in some degree the two ideas of grace and karma. Pali Buddhism gave it a place, at the same time as it did the idea of Pure Lands. C.B. the important text quoted by Paul Mus, Barabudur, p. 802. Sumangalavilasini, commenting on the Tevijja Sutta: “The karma of the worlds of pure Form and beyond Form acts towards the world of Desire like the overflow of a great river which overlaps a little brook, does away with it, takes its place and spreads about.”

4⁸ Long Sutra, n. 16 (p. 36) and 11 (p. 28), etc. Short Sutra, n. 2 (p. 91). On this score, it is to Purgatory rather than to Heaven that Sukhavati could be compared; or again, to those Paradises of which Origen speaks in the Perierchon, II, 11, 6, where the saints, after this life, pass through various stages of instruction.

4⁹ Or even, to the “glory of St. Thomas Aquinas” in the Spanish chapel in Sainte-Marie-Nouvelle of Florence: the Saint, seated, enthroned in the open sky, his forehead emitting luminous rays, symbols of the teaching which he continues to spread around.

5¹ Short Sutra, n. 6 (pp. 95 - 96). Long Sutra, n. 18 (pp. 37 - 38). Meditation Sutra, n. 25 (p. 193). Suffering, impermanence, impersonality, are in fact already the basic teaching of the Lesser Vehicle. M. Paul Mus can say of the great compositions of Tuan-huang, as of those of Yun-kang and Long-men, and without excepting the Paradises of Amida from them, that the veritable subject of them is the Law: Barabudur, p. 599, note.

5² “Amrta”. It is the same word as “ambrosia”. C.B. pseudo-Asvaghosa (Kumalarata?) on the Sangha: “the Vessel of this Ambrosia (= of Buddha)”. Sylvain Levi. About Asvaghosa, in Asiatic Journal, vol. 215, p. 278. Brhad-Aranyaka Upanishad, 11.6: “It is Immortality, Brahman, the All”.

5³ C.B. the Bonze Mochizuki, of the Jodo, in Steinilber-Oberlin, op. cit., p. 208: “The Paradise of the Pure Land is Amida himself, who is essence, time, space, absolute wisdom.” Thus, in the Lotus, the inhabitants of the Buddha-Land are made of the same pure substance as this Land, and each one “existing by himself does not see other beings outside himself.” (Burnouf, p. 224).

5⁴ Origen, Contra Celsum: “autobasileia”. Ruysbroeck, The Mirror of Eternal Salvation, chapters 1 and 3 “this living Paradise which He is himself”, “the Kingdom of Heaven is the living Christ in us” (Works, French translation, vol. 1, third edition, 1919, pp. 48 - 49 and 67). Previously, Clement, Stromites, VI, I,: “The Saviour is our gnosis and spiritual Paradise.”

5⁵ The Cloud of Unknowing, ch. iii: “Think of God only and not of his goods”. (translated Armel Guerne, 1953, p. 22): Theodoret, Ninth Discourse on Providence! “The haven, for those who have attained the peak of virtue, is neither life, resurrection, nor anything other admirable, but that One alone, who constitutes the object of their desire.” (translated Yvan Azema, 1954, p. 286).

5⁹ To compare Surangama-Sutra, translated S. Beal, A Catena of Buddhist Scriptures, (1871), p. 335 (C.B. Paul Mus, The Buddha in regalia, p. 107) and pseudo-Denis, Heavenly Hierarchy, ch. 15, 2 “The sensible fire is so to speak present everywhere, it illumines everything without mingling with anything and while remaining totally separated. . . It envelops what it consumes, and does not let itself be enveloped by it . . . It is active, powerful, everywhere invisible and present . . .” (M. de Gandillac, p. 237; Darboy, new edition, p. 61).

6⁰ Nicetas Stethatos, Second Letter to the Sophist. C.B. Jean Danislou, Earth and Paradise in the Fathers of the Church, in Eranos-Yearbook, XXII, (1954), pp. 471 - 472: “This heavenly paradise itself finally is only a final theophany of . . . the first archetype, the trinitarian God hidden from the apophetic theology. . . The Fathers have designated the personal Pneuma as the perfume of the divine life. The Son is the archetypal Tree of Life of which that of Paradise is the sacrament. . . In the depths of the luminous darkness, the terra vera, principalis, archetype, the root of life, of which our present earth is only the final reflection, appears to us in the Father . . .”

6¹ On these relations between the idea of the absolute and the idea of space (void), C.B. Andre Baseau, The Absolute in Buddhist Philosophy, evolution of the notion of asamskata (multi-copied thesis, Paris, centre of university documentation, 1951). C.B. infra, ch. 12, note 79. Asanga, Mahayana Sutralamkara, IX, 15. The Atago-Kuya Nô says: “There is only one Buddha (whatever the name given to him), which really means: there is only the unity of the Buddhas (G. Renondeau, Buddhism in the Nô, p. 112).

6⁴ C.B. H. Nakamura, op. cit., p. 115: “The authority devotee of the nembutsu does not pray: he expresses his joy and gratitude. To pray to Amida would be contrary to his Vow.” Edward Conze, op. cit., p. 158. The Bonze Kemyo Kawasiki, in Steinilber-Oberlin, op. cit., p. 218: “The Buddhist asks nothing of Buddha: his prayer is an act of faith, of homage, an effort to purify his consciousness . . .” There is in this last text at once a modernising interpretation and a polemical point, opposing the Amidist’s homage to the self-interested demons of the Christian: “The Christian wants some benefit from God . . .”

6⁶ Texts quoted in Leon Wieger, Amidism. . ., pp. 43 - 44, and in D.T. Suzuki, Essays on Zen Buddhism, vol. 3, (Translated Rene Daumal, 1943), pp. 233 and 234. C.B. Supra, ch. 9.

6⁹ A Study of Shin Buddhism, (Kyoto, 1925), pp. 28 and 44 - 45. This idea of reciprocal inclusion thanks to the profound identify with Amida is the central idea of the work.

7⁰ The Development . . ., loc. cit., pp. 313 - 314 and 320 - 321. Such was already, in another form, the teaching of the Mahayanist Awakening of Faith, translated by M. Suzuki (p. 98): “The totality of infinite merits constitutes in fact the sole spirit, perfect in itself, which does not at all have to seek anything outside itself.”