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Under the reign of Phocas, the fortifications of Merdin, Dara, Amida, and Edessa, were successively besieged, reduced, and destroyed, by the Persian monarch: he passed the Euphrates, occupied the Syrian cities, Hierapolis, Chalcis, and Berrhæa or Aleppo, and soon encompassed the walls of Antioch with his irresistible arms.
The inhabitants are produced from the Lotus flower, and have pure and fragrant bodies, fair and well-formed countenances, with hearts full of wisdom, and free from vexation. They are without pain or sickness, and never become old. This is the Paradise of the West; and the way to obtain it the most simple imaginable, depending on one sentence, O-me-to-fuh. Amida Buddha!"
Amida, the personification of boundless light, is one of the luxuriant growths of a sickly scholasticism a hollow abstraction without life or reality. Amidaism is utterly repudiated by many Japanese Buddhists, who give no place to his idol on their altars, and reject utterly the teaching as to Paradise and salvation through the merits of another.
The invocation of Amida is a meritorious act of the believer, much repetition being the substance of this combination of personal and vicarious work. Belief and repetition of prayer secure birth into the Pure Land after the death of the body, and then the soul moves onward toward the perfection of Buddha-hood.
Salvation Through the Merits of Another. In this absolute trust in the all-saving power of Amida as compared with the ways promulgated before, we see the emergence of the Buddhist doctrine of justification by faith, the simplification of theology, and a revolt against Buddhist scholasticism.
Beginning at six o'clock in the morning, it went on till six o'clock in the evening. It was just at its conclusion while I was there. Mingling with the chorus from the priests and the choir ran a low murmur from the crowd. The old country men and women said their prayers aloud, and the refrain of "Namu Amida Butsu" seemed perpetually in one's ears.
The funeral of the prince of the Chionites was celebrated according to the rites of the country; and the grief of his aged father was alleviated by the solemn promise of Sapor, that the guilty city of Amida should serve as a funeral pile to expiate the death, and to perpetuate the memory, of his son.
"And the water, murmuring among the lotos-buds, speaks to the souls in them of Infinite Memory and Infinite Vision, and of the Four Infinite Feelings. "And in that place there is no difference between gods and men, save that under the splendor of Amida even the gods must bend; and all sing the hymn of praise beginning, 'O Thou of Immeasurable Light!
Be-times we pass a scattered multitude of sculptured stones, like segments of four-sided pillars old haka, the forgotten tombs of a long-abandoned cemetery; or the solitary image of some Buddhist deity a dreaming Amida or faintly smiling Kwannon. All are ancient, time-discoloured, mutilated; a few have been weather-worn into unrecognisability.
It seems to have been when matters were at this point that an ambassador of high rank arrived from Kobad, empowered to conclude a peace, and instructed to declare his master's willingness to surrender all his conquests, including Amida, on the payment of a considerable sum of money.
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