The most important of the five are Vairocana and Amitabha.  Akshobhya is mentioned in both the Lotus and Smaller Sukhavati-vyuha as the chief Buddha of the eastern quarter, and a work purporting to be a description of his paradise still extant in Chinese[76] is said to have been translated in the time of the Eastern Han dynasty.  But even in the Far East he did not find many worshippers.  More enduring has been the glory of Vairocana who is the chief deity of the Shingon sect in Japan and is represented by the gigantic image in the temple at Nara.  In Java he seems to have been regarded as the principal and supreme Buddha.  The name occurs in the Mahavastu as the designation of an otherwise unknown Buddha of luminous attributes and in the Lotus we hear of a distant Buddha-world called Vairocana-rasmi-pratimandita, embellished by the rays of the sun.[77] Vairocana is clearly a derivative of Virocana, a recognized title of the sun in Sanskrit, and is rendered in Chinese by Ta-jih meaning great Sun.  How this solar deity first came to be regarded as a Buddha is not known but the connection between a Buddha and light has always been recognized.  Even the Pali texts represent Gotama as being luminous on some occasions and in the Mahayanist scriptures Buddhas are radiant and light-giving beings, surrounded by halos of prodigious extent and emitting flashes which illuminate the depths of space.  The visions of innumerable paradises in all quarters containing jewelled stupas and lighted by refulgent Buddhas which are frequent in these works seem founded on astronomy vaporized under the influence of the idea that there are millions of universes all equally transitory and unsubstantial.  There is no reason, so far as I see, to regard Gotama as a mythical solar hero, but the celestial Buddhas[78] clearly have many solar attributes.  This is natural.  Solar deities are so abundant in Vedic mythology that it is hardly possible to be a benevolent god without having something of the character of the sun.  The stream of foreign religions which flowed into India from Bactria and Persia about the time of the Christian era brought new aspects of sun worship such as Mithra, Helios and Apollo and strengthened the tendency to connect divinity and light.  And this connection was peculiarly appropriate and obvious in the case of a Buddha, for Buddhas are clearly revealers and light-givers, conquerors of darkness and dispellers of ignorance.

Amitabha (or the Buddha of measureless light), rising suddenly from an obscure origin, has like Avalokita and Vishnu become one of the great gods of Asia.  He is also known as Amitayus or measureless life, and is therefore a god of light and immortality.  According to both the Lotus and the Smaller Sukhavati-vyuha he is the lord of the western quarter but he is unknown to the Lalita-vistara.  It gives the ruler of the west a lengthy title,[79] which suggests a land of gardens.  Now Paradise, which has biblical authority