China before Buddhism, this litany is not a Buddhist litany at all. But both in the ritual of Ceylon, and in the chants of the monks of Nepâl, Dharma or Prajnâ, the great "Mother of Buddha," the great "Mother of Saints," is worshipped. Aditî in India was thus worshipped quite as early as Kwan Yin in China. Let us listen to a hymn in the Rig-Veda :"Aditi is heaven. Aditi is air. Aditî is the Mother, the Father, the Son. and the five species of beings. born, and all that will be born."

Aditi is all the gods,

Aditî is all that is

The similarity of the Buddhist and Christian liturgies has induced other writers to jump to the conclusion that the Chinese ritual, at any rate, was borrowed from some ritual brought to China by early Christian missionaries. In the path of this theory is the fact that incense, processions, an address to the Triratna, and the other points of similarity traced by Professor Beal, exist in all Buddhist countries. And the evidence of the early Buddhist sculptures might be adduced, and also the early Brahminical rituals, to give these practices an antiquity far greater than that of Christianity. General Cunningham 1 gives us, side by side, the ground plan of Sanchi, one of Asoka's topes (B.C. circa 250), and the ground plan of Ajanta, one of the later Buddhist cave-temples (about A.D. 1 "Bhilsa Topes," plate ii.

R

500). For all purposes of worship they are identical. In each is the "sanctuary." This at Sanchi is represented by the tumulus and rails. In each the main court is marked off by a rectangle rounded at one end, like the Christian apse. At Sanchi this is effected by lines of monoliths. At Ajanta there All this means

are columns cut out of the rock. that in the earliest Buddhist monuments, the temple was already an apparatus for Buddhist rites as we know them. Those rites, like all early rites, consisted in a dramatic representation of what the ancients call the "Mysteries." "It was feigned," says Clement of Alexandria, speaking of them, "that the soul was buried in the body as in a sepulchre.' "1 This was the pastos, or bed, the mystical Hades.

"For to be plunged in matter, is to descend to Hades, and there fall asleep." This is a citation from Plotinus, by the celebrated mystic, T. Taylor. This "Hades," this "sepulchre" in the temple, was an actual cemetery. It will be remembered that Constantine found great difficulty in inducing the Christians to forsake the catacomb worship for a cathedral above ground. In Buddhism the choristers. come first into this sepulchre to represent birth in the lower life; they then march within the mystic rails, and make three turns round the chaitya 1 Strom., lib. iii. 2 "Ennead," i. lib. 8.

(heaven figured as a dome or umbrella). The bloodless oblation is also, as I have shown, a symbol of the soul, like Buddha leaving the "cemetery" for the "Other Bank," the birth of the spiritual man.

It has been said that by ritual the earlier form of a creed is best ascertained. I will copy down a

sentence or two from the ritual of Ceylon.

"I worship continually the Buddhas of the ages

that are past,

"I worship the Buddhas, the all-pitiful,

"I worship with bowed head."

May Buddha forgive me my sin."

It is plain here that the worship of the non-God

is an after-thought, stultified by the ritual.

CHAPTER XIX.

THE BUDDHIST TRIAD.

IN the Indian religion it was feigned that the ecliptic, or circle of the year, was a great serpent with his tail in his mouth-Ananta, the Endless.

This serpent was supposed to be cut in half, and to become two serpents which represented Summer, or the period of life, and Winter, or the period of death. These two serpents, as Ketu and Râhu, also represented good and evil with the Buddhists and Brahmins.

The word "Union" is the key-stone of all ancient mysteries. With the Brahmins this was Yoga. With the Buddhists it was Sañgha. In early Christianity it was the mystic "marriage." Buddha (heaven, spirit, the universal father) was allied to Dharma (earth, matter, the universal mother), and from the union was born the mystic child, the "Voice of Brahma," as the Lalita Vistara calls it. Sañgha, in the Scriptures of Nepâl, is said to be the "Creator of the world," and