almost entirely geographical, leaving the customs of this forbidden land still a field for fiction and romance. Thus we are told that, amidst the solitudes of this "Land of the Supernatural" repose the spirits of "The Masters," the Mahatmas, whose astral bodies slumber in unbroken peace, save when they condescend to work some petty miracle in the world below. In presenting here the actualities of the cults and customs of Tibet; and lifting higher than before the veil which still hides its mysteries from European eyes, the subject may be viewed under the following sections: a. HISTORICAL. The changes in primitive Buddhism leading to Lāmaism, and the origins of Lamaism and its sects. b. DOCTRINAL. The metaphysical sources of the doctrine. The doctrine and its morality and literature. c. MONASTIC. The Lamaist order. Its curriculum, daily life, dress, etc., discipline, hierarchy and incarnate-deities and reembodied saints. d. BUILDINGS. Monasteries, temples, monuments, and shrines. e. PANTHEON AND MYTHOLOGY, including saints, images, fetishes, and other sacred objects and symbols. f. RITUAL AND SORCERY, comprising sacerdotal services for the laity, astrology, oracles and divination, charms and necromancy. 9. FESTIVALS AND SACRED PLAYS, with the mystic plays and masquerades. h. POPULAR AND DOMESTIC LĀMAISM in every-day life, customs, and folk-lore. Such an exposition will afford us a fairly full and complete survey of one of the most active, and least known, forms of existing Buddhism; and will present incidentally numerous other topics of wide and varied human interest. For Lamaism is, indeed, a microcosm of the growth of religion and myth among primitive people; and in large degree an objectlesson of their advance from barbarism towards civilization. And it preserves for us much of the old-world lore and petrified beliefs of our Aryan ancestors. 5 II. CHANGES IN PRIMITIVE BUDDHISM LEADING TO LĀMAISM. "Ah! Constantine, of how much ill was cause, O understand the origin of Lamaism and its place in the glance at its growth, to see the points at which the strange creeds and cults crept in, and the gradual crystallization of these into a religion differing widely from the parent system, and opposed in so many ways to the teaching of Buddha. No one now doubts the historic character of Siddharta Gautama, or Sakya Muni, the founder of Buddhism; though it is clear the canonical accounts regarding him are overlaid with legend, the fabulous addition of after days. Divested of its embellishment, the simple narrative of the Buddha's life is strikingly noble and human. Some time before the epoch of Alexander the Great, between the fourth and fifth centuries before Christ, Prince ŞAKYA MUNI. Siddharta appeared in India as an original thinker and teacher, deeply conscious of the degrading thraldom of caste and the 1 DANTE, Paradiso, xx. (Milton's trans.) ⚫ See Chapter v. for details of the gradual growth of the legends. See Chronological Table, Appendix i. priestly tyranny of the Brahmans,1 and profoundly impressed with the pathos and struggle of Life, and earnest in the search of ⚫ some method of escaping from existence which was clearly involved with sorrow. His touching renunciation of his high estate, of his beloved wife, and child, and home, to become an ascetic, in order to master the secrets of deliverance from sorrow; his unsatisfying search for truth amongst the teachers of his time; his subsequent austerities and severe penance, a much-vaunted means of gaining spiritual insight; his retirement into solitude and self-communion; his last struggle and final triumph--latterly represented as a real material combat, the so-called "Temptation of Buddha":— TEMPTATION OF SAKYA MUNI (from a sixth century Ajanta fresco, after Raj. Mitra). "Infernal ghosts and hellish furies round Environ'd thee; some howl'd, some yell'd, some shriek'd, Some bent at thee their fiery darts, while thou 3 1 The treatises on Vedic ritual, called the Brahmanas, had existed for about three centuries previous to Buddha's epoch, according to Max Müller's Chronology (Hibbert Lectures, 1891, p. 58)-the initial dates there given are Rig Veda, tenth century B.C.; Brahmanas, eighth century B.C.; Sutra sixth, and Buddhism fifth century B.C. 2 The researches of Vasiliev, etc., render it probable that Siddharta's father was only a petty lord or chief (cf. also OLDENBERG'S Life, Appendix), and that Ṣakya's pessimistic view of life may have been forced upon him by the loss of his territories through conquest by a neighbouring king. 3 MILTON's Paradise Regained, Book iv his reappearance, confident that he had discovered the secrets of deliverance; his carrying the good tidings of the truth from town to town; his effective protest against the cruel sacrifices of the Brahmans, and his relief of much of the suffering inflicted upon helpless animals and often human beings, in the name of religion; his death, full of years and honours, and the subsequent burial of his relics,-all these episodes in Buddha's life are familiar to English readers in the pages of Sir Edwin Arnold's Light of Asia, and other works. His system, which arose as a revolt against the one-sided development of contemporary religion and ethics, the caste-debasement of man and the materializing of God, took the form, as we shall see, of an agnostic idealism, which threw away ritual and sacerdotalism altogether. Its tolerant creed of universal benevolence, quickened by the bright example of a pure and noble life, appealed to the feelings |