According to Nicholson, the Mystics of Islam borrowed not only from Christianity and Neoplatonism, but from Gnosticism and Buddhism. Many Gospel texts and sayings of Jesus, most of them apocryphal, are cited in the oldest Sufi writings. From Christianity they took the use of the woollen dress, the vows of silence, the litanies (_Zikr_), and other ascetic practices. Their teaching also has many interesting parallels which Nicholson summarizes as follows: “The same expressions are applied to the founder of Islam which are used by St. John, St. Paul, and later mystical theologians concerning Christ. Thus, Mohammed is called the Light of God, he is said to have existed before the creation of the world, he is adored as the source of all life, actual and possible, he is the Perfect Man in whom all the divine attributes are manifested, and a Sufi tradition ascribes to him the saying, ‘He that hath seen me hath seen Allah.’ In the Moslem scheme, however, the Logos doctrine occupies a subordinate place, as it obviously must when the whole duty of man is believed to consist in realizing the unity of God.”[72] Neoplatonism gave them the doctrine of emanation and ecstasy. The following version of the doctrine of the seventy thousand veils, as expounded to Canon Gairdner by a modern dervish, shows clear traces of Gnosticism. “Seventy Thousand Veils separate Allah, the One reality, from the world of matter and of sense. And every soul passes before his birth through these seventy thousand. The inner half of these are veils of light: the outer half, veils of darkness. For every one of the veils of light passed through, in this journey towards birth, the soul puts off a divine quality; and for every one of the dark veils, it puts on an earthly quality. Thus the child is born weeping, for the soul knows its separation from Allah, the one Reality. And when the child cries in its sleep, it is because the soul remembers something of what it has lost. Otherwise, the passage through the veils has brought with it forgetfulness (_nisyan_): and for this reason man is called _insan_. He is now, as it were, in prison in his body, separated by these thick curtains from Allah. But the whole purpose of Sufism, the Way of the dervish, is to give him an escape from this prison, an apocalypse of the Seventy Thousand Veils, a recovery of the original unity with The One, while still in this body.”[73] In regard to Buddhist influence, Professor Goldziher has called attention to the fact that in the eleventh century the teaching of Buddha exerted considerable influence in eastern Persia, especially at Balkh, a city famous for the number of Sufis who dwelt in it. From the Buddhists came the use of the rosary (afterwards adopted by Christians in Europe), and perhaps also the doctrine of _fana_ or absorption into God.