a 
- 

1923. | St. Thomas and San Thomé, Mylapore. 229 
which seems to have taken place in the East in the earliest 
centuries of our era. In this theory she was anticipated more 
than a century ago by Captain F. Wilford in his wonderful paper 
on the Origin and Vecline of the Christian Religion in India, 
Asiatick Researches, X (1808), pp. 27-126. 
“Ina shrine at Tung-huan, Dr. Stein noted the Octagon 
base of the Chief Image and, elsewhere, found the Throne of 
Buddha supported by Lions with curled manes, which is a 
marked feature in a mandara I lately found in a little village 
temple, where Shaka, wearing the Triple Rainbow-halo, is en- 
throned on a Lotus upborne by two Naga-mermaidens, amidst 
the Signs of the Zodiac, Leo’s mane being strongly curled.”’ 
Cf. Mrs. E. A. Gordon, World-Healers, op. cit.. p. 444. where 
she compares the fact with de Marignolli’s description of St. 
Thomas in his Indian paintings.! A MS. note, at p. 332 of the 
copy of World-Healers which she most obligingly sent me from 
Kioto, states that in a Korean mandara, which she found at 
Seoul, April 1913, Shaka is seated on atrue lion. “ Illustrated 
inmy Symbols, p —’’, and she compares the ‘ Dog of Fo’, or ‘ the 
Chinese Lion’ or ‘ the Korean Dog’ to the Lion of Shaka’s tribe 
(the Messiah’s tribe, according to her). In her Asian Oristo- 
logy, a book not now at my disposal, she states repeatedly, [ 
believe, that in China the dogs of Fo are called Persian dogs, 
1.€., lions, as there are no lions in China, and because, I fancy, 
the symbolism came from ia. 
25. St. Thomas’ mantle of peacocks’ feathers and the King of 
Peacocks.— Why should St Thomas have been depicted with a 
mantle of peacock feathers? Was it because Mylapore, where 
the St. Thomas Christians believe him to have died, means 
Mayilapur, or Peacock Town? Or_ because, according to 
p. 375, n. 1), the 
middle of the peafowl, a native aimed at one of them and shot 
im ? i 
Tecounted by de Marignolli, Marco Polo, and Barbosa. What 
may they 2 
Mrs. E. A. Gordon (World-Healers, 1. 124) writes of Hiien 
T’sang : “ He quotes a Northern Buddhist tradition that ‘in 
old time, Tathagata (i.e. Nyorai, or Messiah) was the King of 



' By mistake she speaks of the two dogs, instead of the two ‘lions,’ 
of St. Thomas, (Ibid., p. 444.) 

