Avalokita is also connected with Amitabha’s paradise.  His figure, though its origin is not clear, assumes distinct and conspicuous proportions in India at a fairly early date.  There appears to be no reason for associating him specially with Central Asia.  On the other hand later works describe him as the spiritual son or reflex of Amitabha.  This certainly recalls the Iranian idea of the Fravashi defined as “a spiritual being conceived as a part of a man’s personality but existing before he is born and in independence of him:  it can also belong to divine beings."[553] Although India offers in abundance both divine incarnations and explanations thereof yet none of these describe the relationship between a Dhyani Buddha and his Boddhisattva so well as the Zoroastrian doctrine of the Fravashi.

S. Levi has suggested that the Bodhisattva Manjusri is of Tokharian origin.[554] His worship at Wu-tai-shan in Shan-si is ancient and later Indian tradition connected him with China.  Local traditions also connect him with Nepal, Tibet, and Khotan, and he is sometimes represented as the first teacher of civilization or religion.  But although his Central Asian origin is eminently probable, I do not at present see any clear proof of it.

The case of the Bodhisattva Kshitigarbha[555] is similar.  He appears to have been known but not prominent in India in the fourth century A.D.:  by the seventh century if not earlier his cult was flourishing in China and subsequently he became in the Far East a popular deity second only to Kuan-yin.  This popularity was connected with his gradual transformation into a god of the dead.  It is also certain that he was known in Central Asia[556] but whether he first became important there or in China is hard to decide.  The devotion of the Chinese to their dead suggests that it was among them that he acquired his great position, but his role as a guide to the next world has a parallel in the similar benevolent activity of the Zoroastrian angel Srosh.

One of Central Asia’s clearest titles to importance in the history of the East is that it was the earliest and on the whole the principal source of Chinese Buddhism, to which I now turn.  Somewhat later, teachers also came to China by sea and still later, under the Yuan dynasty, Lamaism was introduced direct from Tibet.  But from at least the beginning of our era onwards, monks went eastwards from Central Asia to preach and translate the scriptures and it was across Central Asia that Chinese pilgrims went to India in search of the truth.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 459:  See Luders, Bruchstucke Buddhistischer Dramen, 1911, and id., Das Sariputra-prakarana, 1911.]

[Footnote 460:  See Senart, “Le ms Kharoshthi du Dhammapada,” in J.A., 1898, II. p. 193.]

[Footnote 461:  Luders, “Die Sakas und die Nordarische Sprache,” Sitzungsber. der Kon.  Preuss.  Akad. 1913.  Konow, Gotting.  Gel.  Anz. 1912, pp. 551 ff.]