In India, as early as Fa-Hian’s time, and probably earlier in China,[358] out of these happy gods a new triad was formulated, receiving such worship as Hindus would render to their later triad of deities, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva. The title of one of these, Mandjus-ri, was said to have been the name of the monk who, two hundred and fifty years after Buddha, introduced the religion into Nepaul, and founded the system which Nâgârdjuna consolidated.[359] He in this connection is believed to be the personification of that “wisdom” or “spiritual insight” which the Northern school valued so highly. Another deity, Avalôkitês’vara, “the lord who sees from on high,” is supposed to be the mythical term for that “kindly providence” which watched over the whole Buddhist world. And Vajra-dhara, “the thunderer,” represented the power which protected the faithful from the malice of demons. How such a worship, so contradictory to the doctrines of primitive Buddhism, came to be introduced and recognised, is a puzzle to all our scholars. Rhys Davids and Sir Monier Williams are inclined to regard it as suggested by the second Hindu triad of deities already referred to. Professor Max Müller[360] considers it to be a graft from the superstitions of some northern Scythian or Turanian race, while Dr. Beal advances the theory that it was in all probability introduced from a western monotheistic religion, either landward through Persia, or by sea from Arabia. However it came, from this date and onwards, all over the wide extent of territory covered by it, Buddhism rapidly deteriorated. While the Southern system was everywhere yielding to the influence of the popular mythology, and that so unmistakably that it became, wherever it reached, “the unconscious propagator of Hindu doctrine,” the Northern became a heterogeneous mixture of all the superstitions which it met. From this second triad of deities it went on discovering or inventing its five triads of Dhyâni-Buddhas, among whom Gotama was the emanation of Avalôkitês’vara, who again was the æon of Amitâbha, “immeasurable light.” Behind all these again, they professed to find the Adi-Buddha, the primordial Buddha, who, out of himself, by the exercise of five meditations, evolved the Five Dhyâni.[361] Each of these again by “insight” evolved their corresponding æons, who in their turn from out of their immaterial essence produced a material world. It is as if the Gnosticism which had broken out in the West long before this time had also invaded the distant East,[362] and as if its dreams, more restrained by Western sobriety, were in the East free to produce a phantasmagoria more confused still. Certainly it is a convincing proof that, notwithstanding its rich ethical sources, the essential principles of Buddhism had no inherent propagative power. For just as it had to return from its atheism to the deities which it had discarded, so it had to substitute for its Nihilism the Western Paradise, where, beyond the