Page:The People of India — a series of photographic illustrations, with descriptive letterpress, of the races and tribes of Hindustan Vol 3.djvu/221

 LAMA, OR BUDDHIST PRIEST. (162)

T is not infrequent to find itinerant Buddhist priests from Tibet in the towns near the northern frontier of India. It is hardly possible that their ceremonies can be acceptable to Hindoos, but there are many Buddhists settled as merchants, and agents of the merchants of Lèh and Ladakh in Tartary, between which places and India there is a considerable trade in shawd wool, borax, and other trans-Himalaya products. To such persons the visits of priests of their own faith and country are, no doubt, welcome. They also wander as far as the fairs of Hurdwar and Gya, living upon charity, which they obtain in spite of their difference of belief The priest is represented sitting at his devotions. A Brahmin would be naked to the waist, marked with the sacred designations of his order, and with bare feet; and his arrangement of objects of worship would be more considerable. The Buddhist priest, on the contrary, wears his felt cap, which he can draw over his ears, a robe of coarse white blanket, and his thick boots, regardless whether they are pure or impure, the latter being then general condition. In his right hand he holds the wooden cylinder, which he rattles for prayer, and at the same time rings the bell in his left hand. Before him is a brass dish or platter in which are a brazier containing fire, and a cup of water; this is flanked by another cup, and a gourd which contains water, and can be tied to his girdle when he is on the march. Across his right shoulder and chest is his string of beads, which, when engaged in prayer, he passes rapidly through his fingers, repeating the appellations of Buddh. Travellers in Tibet describe the prayer wheel set up in wayside shrines, by turning which passengers are supposed to offer supplications in proportion to the turns of the wheel; but such mechanical appliances to devotion are not found in India, nor do they, in any form, conform with the practices of Brahminical Hindooism. At one period, however, in the history of the Northern Provinces of India, the Buddliist religion })revailed to the exclusion of all others. The grandson of Chandi-a Gupta, Asoka, became a convert to Buddhism in the early portion of his reign, and in the year 286 B.C., the seventeenth of his reign, a great synod of priests was convened, at