Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/70

 so that we cannot speak of the form as corresponding to the inner nature. The indifference of the form extends here even to the objectively eternal. Death even is no interruption as regards the substantial Essence; as soon as ever a Lama dies, another is at hand at once, so that the Essence is the same in both, and he can be sought for directly, being recognisable by certain marks. Thus we have a description by the English ambassador Turner of the Lama in Little Thibet; he was a child of two or three years old, whose predecessor had died on a journey to Pekin, to which place he had been summoned by the Chinese Emperor. A regent, the minister of the previous Dalailama, who is designated his cup-bearer, took the place of this child in the affairs of government.

There is a difference between Buddhism and Lamaism. What they have in common has been already indicated, and those who worship Foe and Buddha worship the Dalailama also. It is, however, more under the form of some dead person, who yet has also a present existence among his successors, that the latter is worshipped. Of Foe, too, in like manner, it is related that he had incarnated himself eight thousand times, and had been present in the actual existence of a human being.

Such are the fundamental determinations which result from what is here the divine nature, and which alone result from it, since this itself is still confined entirely to the undeveloped abstraction of calm, characterless Being-within-itself. On this account all further embodiment and mental representation of it is made entirely dependent, partly on the accidental element of empirical historical events, and partly on that of ungoverned imagination. The details of it belong to a description of the countless confused imaginings about certain incidents connected with, or things that have befallen these deities, their friends and disciples, and yield material which, so far as its substance is concerned, has but little