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PLEASANTVILLE RELIGIONS
Figure 10.4 Image of Mani in Cao’an temple near Quanzhou, Fujian, China. The inscription
in gilded Chinese letters reads moni guangfo (Mani, the Buddha of Light). Photo by Gunner
Mikkelsen. Reprinted with permission.
of Light and the Bema ceremony celebrated his entrance into nirvana. An
Australian team of researchers thinks that the veneration of Mani persists
in China even today. According to their fieldwork, a shrine in Quanzhou,
Fujian, contains an image of Mani (figure 10.4), and local worshippers still
venerate Mani as the Buddha of Light (Lieu et al. 2012).
The Mysteries of Jeu
The oldest known Gnostic church handbooks are two Egyptian Coptic
manuscripts that surfaced in the middle of the eighteenth century, the