with some kind of
theism,--which Gautama had expressly renounced.

If any one wants proof of this reversion into the old religions of
India, he has only to notice that the name, given to the new god made by
personification of the attribute of power, Vagrapani, or Vadjradhara, or
the bearer of the thunder-bolt, had formerly been used as an epithet of
the old fire-god of the Vedas, Indra.

It were tedious to recount all the steps in the further development of
Northern Buddhism.[25] Suffice it to say, that out of ideas and
principles set forth in the earlier Buddhism, and under the generating
force reborn from old Brahminism, the Dhyani Buddhas (that is the
Buddhas evolved out of the mind in mystic trance) were given their elect
Buddhas; and so three sets of five were co-ordinated.[26] That is,
first, five pre-penultimate Buddhas; then their Bodhisattvas or
penultimate Buddhas; and then the ultimate or human Buddhas, of which
Gautama was one. Or, first abstraction; then pre-human effluence; then
emanation.

All this multiplication of beings is unknown to Southern Buddhism,
unknown to the Saddharma Pundarika, and very probably unknown also to
the Chinese pilgrims who visited India in the fifth and seventh
centuries. Professor Rhys Davids, in his compact little manual of
Buddhism, says:[27]

"Among those hypothetical beings--the creations of a sickly
scholasticism, hollow abstractions without life or reality--the
fourth Amitabha, 'Immeasurable Light,' whose Bodhisatwa is
Avalokitesvara, and whose emanation is Gautama, occupies of
course the highest and most important rank. Surrounded by
innumerable Bodhisatwas, he sits enthroned under a Bo-tree in
Sukhavati, i.e., the Blissful, a paradise of heavenly joys,
whose description occupies whole tedious books of the so-called
Great Vehicle. By this theory, each of the five Buddhas has
become three, and the fourth of these five sets of three is the
second Buddhist Trinity, the belief in which must have arisen
after the seventh century of our era."

Buddhism has been called the light of Asia, and Gautama its illuminator;
but certainly the light has not been pure, nor the products of its
illumination wholesome. Pardon an illustration. In Christian churches
and cathedrals of Europe, there is still a great prejudice against the
use of pipes, and of gas made from coal, because of the machinery and of
the impure emanations. The preju