[97]See Beal’s Records, i. 114, note 107.
[98]Professor Legge tells us that an intelligent Chinese once asked him whether ‘the worship of Mary in Europe was not similar?’
[99]Legge’s Translation, p. 46. Beal, i. 180, ii. 220. According to Schlagintweit, a historical teacher named Mañju-ṡrī taught in the eighth or ninth century A.D.
[100]Even the Brahmās, after immense periods of life in the Brahmā heavens, have to go through other births in one of the six ways of migration. Sahām-pati may therefore mean ‘the lord of sufferers,’ ‘all life involving suffering,’ and this excludes the idea of his ‘being lord over the Buddha who has not to be born again.’
[101]See Wright’s Nepāl, p. 43.
[102]Beal’s Records, ii. 103, 174.
[103]The images of this deity represent him as coarse and ill-favoured in form (his name in fact signifying ‘deformed’). He has sometimes three legs. As guardian of the northern quarter he is sculptured on the corner pillar of the northern gate of the Bharhut Stūpa. He had a metropolis of his own, according to Hindū mythology (as we know from the Megha-dūta), called Alaka, on the Himālayas.
[104]A very interesting specimen of ancient sculpture representing a Nāga-kanyā may be seen in the museum of the Indian Institute, Oxford. It belongs to a collection of Buddhist antiquities lent by Mr. R. Sewell, of the Madras Civil Service.
[105]I give this as my own theory. I am no believer in the learned M. Senart’s sun theory, or in its applicability to this point.
[106]These are described in Childers’s Pāli Dictionary, s.v.