Page:Three Years in Tibet.djvu/81



At the foot of the mountain out of which we had emerged, and where the plain began, we came upon a stone-turreted gate about twenty-four feet in height. Standing by itself and entirely unprotected, the gate was not intended, as I was told, for any military purpose; but it was used for housing Buḍḍhas and other deities that would keep guard against the invasion of the locality by evil genii. About a mile and a half to the rear of the gate stood the town of Tsarang, at the entrance of which we were met by fourteen or fifteen men, who, as it appeared, anticipated our arrival. Serab Gyaltsan led me to the house of the Chief of the town, which was of considerable size. As in Tibet so in Tsarang, all well-to-do people generally have a separate chapel in their residence. When they have a visitor of rank and social position, they, out of respect, put him up in their chapel, and a person entitled to such distinction in these localities is generally a Lama. So it was that, as a Chinese Lama, I was given that privilege in the Chiefs chapel, which I found to be a typical one of its kind, with its image-crowned altar, a special depository for religious Texts, etc., and altogether much superior in its general finish and furnishings to the family dwelling. I may remark that these folk generally keep a good store of the Texts, not because they make use of them themselves, but more as a matter of form, the form showing their deep reverence for their religion; but it is apparently beyond their ken that volumes of Texts are but so many sheets of waste paper, if their possessors do not understand and live by them.