The Lotus Sutra records that the eight-year-old daughter of the Nāga (Dragon) King attained buddhahood in the southern region. According to the chapter “The Nāga and Birds” in the fourth varga (Shih-chi Ching, “Origin of the Worlds”) of the Chinese translation of the Dirgha-āgama (Ch’ang-a-han Ching, translated by Buddhayagas and Chu Fo-nien in 412-13; T. 1:127-29), at the bottom of the sea was the Sāgara palace. The Cheng-fa-n’ien-ch’u Ching (T. 721; Saddharma-smṛtyupasthāna Sūtra, translated by Prajñāruci in 539) says that there is a great sea (the Arabian Sea) past the mountain called Gurjara in the southern part of Jambudvipa. Five hundred yojanas under this sea is the palace of the Dragon King, adorned with many kinds of jewels (T. 17:405b). We can safely conjecture that behind these traditions is the fact of the prosperity of Gandhāra and Kashmir as centers for East-West trade during the Kuṣāṇa dynasty, and the inflow of riches with the expansion of seaborne trade between the west coast of India and the Roman Empire. In the depiction in the “Devadatta” chapter of the daughter of the Dragon King offering the Buddha a pearl, we may suppose that those people who supported the Nāga cult had a connection with the merchants of that trade, and that with the expansion of the idea of compassion in Buddhism, such low class non-Aryan people became the object of salvation and received predictions of buddhahood; thus it is possible to infer that here we have the Nāga cult (and the buddhahood of women) symbolically being embraced by Buddhism.