Page:Mongolia, the Tangut country, and the solitudes of northern Tibet vol 1 (1876).djvu/46

xxxviii since the invasion of Tibet in 1643, by the Mongol Gushi Khan, who depressed the Reds, and established the Dalai Lama as temporal sovereign of the greater part of Tibet, no such equality exists. The chief prelates of the Red sects in Tibet Proper, in Bhotan, and in Ladak, have now long been in a kind of dependence on the Yellow papacy, and are, both in Lhassa and in Peking, counted among the Khutukhtus or Monsignori of the Lamaitic hierarchy. I have no doubt that Rome, so fertile in analogies with Lamaism, could furnish a perfect parallel; but the nearest that occurs to my scanty knowledge is the position of the priests of the Greek rite in Sicily, or that which a high Catholic prelate was recently alleged to have desired to recognise in certain would-be deserters of the Church of England.

The Khutukhtus, — Monsignori, as I have just called them, or perhaps Cardinals, as Père Huc himself calls them, — form the second order in the hierarchy, and in Tibet Proper, like the Roman cardinals up to 1870, they hold the civil administration of the provinces in their hands. They also are counted among reincarnate saints. The best known of them is that patriarch of Mongolia who, since 1604, dwells at Urga, the most powerful and revered of all the Lama hierarchy after the Two Jewels of Central Tibet. Next to him is the second Mongolian patriarch, dwelling at Kuku Khoto; whilst a third represents Lamaism at the Court of Peking.

After these come the commoner herd of re-incarnates, who are numerous, insomuch that a great many monasteries in Mongolia and Tibet have an incarnate saint, or 'Living Buddha,' as they are sometimes called by travellers, for their abbot. These are the Chaberons of Huc; the Gigens of Prejevalsky. And the Red-caps themselves, who in former times admitted of succession by natural descent, have now adopted this supernatural system.