Page:History of Corea, ancient and modern; with description of manners and customs, language and geography (1879).djvu/387

 1MM0RTALIT7. 367 in the mountain god ; comprising all the believers in Buddhism, in addition to many mo^e who do not believe in Buddhism. The god of war is worshipped only in the capital, where there are two temples in his honour ; but China has one in every city. Confucius is worshipped twice a year,— once in spring, and again in autumn ; but only by the magistrate who is over each city. The king worships him in the capital Some of hi3| disciples are also worshipped. The magistrate in all cases sacrifices sheep in the stone built temples. There are no sheep in Corea ; those sacrificed are purchased at the "Corean gate'' from the Chinese. The doctrine of immortality is necessarily believed in, wherever the Chinese form of Buddhism flourishes ; for the ambition of priest, monk, or vegetarian believer, is that, by his abstinence and his diligent chanting of litanies, he may become a " god," the equivalent of the Boman Catholic saint, — attained in much the same fashion. But the highest aspiration of Buddhism, is that the soul should be absorbed into Nirvana or nothingness, which really means annihilation ; for the soul is to cease to exist as a separate entity. Tet that the soul of every man is immortal, does not seem to be a universal, — it is certainly not among the Coreans universally a practical, — ^belief. The first Corean with whom the writer ever came in contact, regarded the notion that all had souls destined to endless existence, one to be ridiculed ; for only the priests and pious people could thus live. True, he was a very ignorant youth; but when the Corean scholar, who is with me now, came under my notice, he was about to drink some opium, to end a life of poverty among strangers ; and to one capable of such a deed, immortality can be only a fiction. The sacrifices and addresses to the departed, as recorded above, might seem to imply a belief in immortality; and it cannot be denied that there is, of necessity, a hazy kind of spiritual existence, after death, believed in wherever Buddhism prevails ; and especially where dead ancestors are sacrificed to, in the belief that the departed spirits can exert an influence for good or evil upon the living. We do not believe that any of the