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Rh further questions concerning the Burmese and their intermittent gilding the Brahman returned a dumb stare. He led us up into the temple, through an archway in a wall twenty feet thick, to a square whitewashed cell, and up to a second chilly, white vault where the light fell through a triangular east window full upon the image on the carved basalt altar. It was a tawdry, gilded image, more asleep than serenely meditating, with a Hindu caste-mark on its brow—"Buddha's mother!" said the Brahman, For further shock and disillusionment, it was only necessary to note that the image was attired in a red merino petticoat and a tinsel-bordered cape—"to keep the image warm," said the Brahman, winding his grimy sheet more closely around him in that chill sanctuary. There was a litter of food and flower, incense and candle offerings on the altar in true Burmese fashion, scores of Tibetan flags and streamers in the corners of the room, while old Buddhist bas-reliefs built into the wall were buttered and garlanded in the Hindu manner — a medley of religions in the one shrine. It was hard to believe that this untidy vault, this religious lumber-room, was the supreme shrine, the ark, the tabernacle, the holy of holies. It was harder to realize that the stone image, the shabby old "Buddha's mother," all daubed with gold-leaf, successor to innumerable images of gold, perfumed paste, basalt, sandstone, and stucco—this clumsy image, with its stolid, vacant face, was intended for the same beautiful, passionless Teacher who meditates, steeped in the peace of eternal Nirvana, in the gilded temples of Japan or beneath Kamakura's pine-trees.