although there are many gods, yet there is a supreme one who is the God of the gods.'

1

Another chief priest explained that, in his view, there was a supreme God, but when a Buddha was on earth the Buddha was supreme. I shall show by and by how this quaint fancy may have arisen. I have already quoted enough to confute the assertion of Mr. Rhys Davids, that the idea of a supreme Buddha is unknown in Ceylon. Let us consider some other Buddhist countries. China, Amitâbha is called Omito Fo,2 and his statue figures in the temples. In a popular legend written two hundred years ago, Sâkya Muni, on being appealed to, himself makes "an appeal to God" in favour of the supplicant.3

In

When Father Borri visited Cochin-China in the sixteenth century, he found that the Buddhists there recognised an efficient and intellectual cause for God." Fresh from the study of some of their agnostic treatises, he twitted them with atheism. In answer, they showed him. the high altar of the temple kept purposely free from idols, and with a vacant dark space behind, "to express that he whom they adore as God, and on whom the pagods (Buddhas?) call, who, like us, were visible and corporeal men, is invisible." 4

In Japan, I learn from Mr. Pfoundes,5 a gentleman who has spent more than eight years of his life in Japanese temples, the statue of Amitâbha is everywhere under the title of Amida Butz; and this is quite distinct from, and even more reverenced than, Shaka Muny, the Japanese term for Sâkya. Under the title, Niorai, a loftier and more abstract divinity still is known to the Japanese. It must be remembered that Japan derived its Buddhism from Ceylon.

I have had the advantage of conversing in London with a gentleman named Oung Gyee, who has served his novi

1 Upham's Sacred and Historical Books of Ceylon, p. 13.

2 Davis, The Chinese, vol. ii. p. 87.

3 Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (H. Giles), vol. ii. p. 321. 4 Account of Cochin-China, chap. viii.

5 Author of "Japanese Folklore," &c.

B

tiate in a Burmese temple. He tells me that they have the statues of the seven great Buddhas in each Burmese fane, Sâkya, Kâsyapa, Kanaka Muni, &c., but that each of these is only "God," or Gautama, under a different name. Amitâbha is unknown in Southern Buddhism; it is plain, however, that the word Gautama expresses this same idea. Buddha in the "Lalita Vistara" prays to Brahma; and in the crisis of his great battle with the "wicked one" appeals to Brahma for protection. He called his followers Brâhmanas (seekers after Brahma), as I shall by and by show; and promised the awakened man the world of Brahma for his reward. The controversy about the date of the words Âdi Buddha and Amitâbha is a mere logomachy. Amitâbha means "boundless light." But Brahma is also all-pervading light, and this light is spoken of in the Gâyatrî as distinct from the light of the sun.1 Âdi Buddha is also light. The ether, or Âkâsa, the fifth element in India, was the ultimate of this idea. It was imaged as a silvery luminosity, and modern mesmerists try to identify it with the subtle mesmeric fluid.2

We will now consider the Buddhist triad and its symbolism, because symbolism is less open than literature to the manipulations of a shifting orthodoxy.

The Tri Ratna outline is that of the two serpents (fig. 2, pl. ii.) entwined round a rod; figs. 3 and 4 show this in its ornamental form. Fig. 4 crowns each gateway of the Sanchi tope, one of the earliest Buddhist temples. Tri Ratna (three gems) is the word employed by Buddhists for the "three precious symbols of the faith."

If once you have the secret of it, you will find this Tri Ratna outline accentuated through the length and breadth of Buddhism. Fig. 6 is a magic tortoise from Tibet, given by Schlagintweit as a Buddhist charm against evil spirits; fig. 5 a conventional head of Buddha, which I sketched in

1 Colebrooke, vol. i. pp. 127, 128.

2 Comp. Colebrooke, vol. i. pp. 338, 346, 276; and Hodgson, pp. 83, 86 104, &c.

the India Museum. The meaning of his impossible ears is, I think, very plain. If the reader will turn to Schlagintweit's designs in his " Buddhism in Tibet," he will find the outline repeated in numbers of fanciful ways. Thus one charm against evil spirits represents two spirits chained to a disc, the head of the male spirit being where the head of our tortoise is (fig. 6), and the head of the female spirit at the point of the tortoise's tail. Even the conventional hermit squatting under his tree is sometimes coaxed into this Tri Ratna outline in old coins. Fig. 1, from the Catacombs, shows how the old mysticisms interlaced.

હૈ,

Fig. A.

To prevent confusion, I will allude to the three "gems" as Serpent, Sun, and Tree. I give them here (fig. A) as represented in their crudest form on an amulet inscribed with the most sacred motto of Buddhism

O'm mani padme hom.

O holy triad! O pearl in the lotus !

I take the design from Schlagintweit's "Buddhism in

Tibet."

THE SERPENT.

The serpent is the male, the fatherly procreative principle; he is Draco at the pole, and also called Kshetra, the spike of the mystic umbrella, under which form the Indians imaged the cosmos (see fig. 5, pl. ii.). As the umbrella handle passes down through the earth, supposed to be flat, the serpent becomes the serpent of Mount Meru, through which mountain the handle passes. Below the earth are waters illimitable, and here the serpent becomes the tortoise; fig. 6 shows why. Also the fatherly principle in the waters is imaged by the Makara, the great fish or leviathan (see the mansion of the Buddhist Capricorn, pl. i.). This explains a great deal of the Indian mythology, such as the belief that the elephant, supported on the serpent Sêsha, or the tortoise, or the leviathan, bears the