“Thou highly-esteemed one, O thou shining Mânî our guide, thou the root of illumination, branch of uprightness, thou the great tree, thou who art the sovereign Remedy.”
A third prostration, and the praise runs:
“I prostrate myself and praise with a pure heart and a sincere tongue, the Great God, the Father of the Lights and of their elements, the most highly praised, the glorified, thee and all thy Majesty and thy blessed worlds that thou hast called forth! To praise thee is to praise equally thy troops, thy justified ones, thy word, thy majesty, thy good pleasure. For thou art the God who is all Truth, all Life, and all Justice.”
Then comes a fourth prostration and the sentence:
“I praise all the gods, all the shining angels, all the lights, and all the troops who are from the Great God, and I prostrate myself before them.”
The speech after the fifth prostration is:
“I prostrate myself and I praise the great troops, and the shining gods who, with their Wisdom spread over the Darkness, pursue it and conquer it.”
While the sixth, and last given in full, is simply:
“I prostrate myself and I praise the Father of Majesty, the eminent one, the shining one who has come forth from the two sciences[[1150]].”
It seems fairly plain that these praises are addressed not so much to the “King of the Paradise of Light” or Highest God of Goodness as to the lesser Powers of Light. The recent expeditions of European scholars to Central Asia have succeeded in recovering for us almost in full the Confession-Prayer repeated ritually by the Manichaean Hearers or laymen which, besides confirming the Christian and Mahommedan accounts of Manes’ teaching summarized above, shows a greater belief in the efficacy of repentance and the enforcement of a stricter morality upon all classes of Manichaeans than we should have imagined from the accounts of their adversaries[[1151]]. We are fortunate in possessing more than one text of this Confession-Prayer, that found by the energy of our English emissary, Dr (now Sir Marc Aurel) Stein, in the “Cave of the Thousand Buddhas” at Tun-huang, proving almost identical with the one discovered in Turfan by the Russian Expedition and now in St Petersburg, while both can be checked and supplemented by fragments also found at Turfan by Profs. Grünwedel’s and von Le Coq’s expeditions to the same place and taken to Berlin[[1152]]. The title and first few lines of this prayer have been lost, owing to the fact that the Chinese plan of writing on a continuous sheet of paper many yards in length, which was then rolled up with the last lines innermost, was adopted by its transcribers. All the specimens yet found are in Turkish, the Russian MS. being in the dialect called after the nation using it, Ouigour or Uighur, and like that found by Dr Stein and the Berlin fragments, in the Manichaean modification of the Estranghelo or Syriac script. The prayer or litany is in 15 sections or classes, the number having doubtless a mystical reference[[1153]], and is followed in the Russian and English examples by a recapitulation which is not without value. The version which follows is a compound of all the three sources mentioned above, and has been here divided into three parts, although it is not so in the original, for convenience of commentary.