ABSTRACT
In the ancient days the Arian Indians themselves penetrated into what was to become their five-streamed homeland through the lands of the North-West. Alexander the Great and his successors the Greek kings of Eastern Iran marched along the same roads, and were followed by inner-asiatic peoples like the Saka, the Kushan and the Hephthalites. The jungle of cults and systems conjured up —to which Kalacakra has been anachronistically added—is as characteristic for Padmaism as the method used to convert various peoples by exploiting their own beliefs. Since the days of Padmasambhava himself, who boasted that he was a greater necromancer than Buddha, blatant magic, and usually black-magic, rites take far too important a position, whilst at the same time the eroticized Vajrayana was also very prominent. In particular the figure of Buddha, ‘immeasurable light’, Amitabha, with his paradise Sukhavati, regarded as being in the West, strongly suggests the influence of Iranian religious ideas.
