A BUDDHIST PRIEST.

To face p. 208.

Now, it is evident that at an early stage in human thought, the idea of men and women suffering such terrible torments in the prison-houses of the under world touched men with infinite compassion, and a new doctrine was conceived that was intended to mitigate the horrors connected with the retribution for wrong-doing. This was the famous theory of metempsychosis, which has permeated the whole of the East, and has made a permanent impression upon every one of the native religions.

Metempsychosis, as it is understood in China, declares that every adult sixteen years after entering the Land of Shadows is allowed to depart to be born again into some position on earth. There is a general release to every one, good, bad, and indifferent, and once more they may return to the upper world and be relieved from the pain and gloom of that sunless realm.

But even in this great act of mercy the ideas with regard to retribution for evil and reward for virtue are sedulously maintained. The bad man who is let out of the hideous prison in which he has been confined is not to be allowed to escape the consequences of his previous vicious life. He is allowed to return to the world again, but he will appear perhaps in the shape of a pig or a dog, or some other of the lower animals.

It is for this reason that the Buddhists are so opposed to the taking of animal life. The animal upon whose flesh they are feeding may have been when he lived before on the earth a notorious criminal, who for his iniquities has been degraded by being transformed into, say, a buffalo. Wrong-doing is a serious matter, and though released from the pains of hell and allowed back again to earth, the criminal must pay the penalty in the debased condition in which he is allowed to live once more amongst men. A cock that is waking the morn with his shrill and defiant cries may have been a man that a few years ago lived in another part of the Empire, and who for his wickedness has been condemned to take the shape of the animal whose voice fills the barnyard with its echoes. It may take a good many births before these two individuals shall have expiated the crimes they committed, and shall be allowed again the dignity of appearing amongst mankind on earth.

Even in regard to the criminals who are undergoing the extreme tortures that the King of the Land of Shadows knows how to inflict, the thought of mercy comes in to break upon the monotony of their suffering. Every year for the whole of August their prison doors are opened and their chains and fetters are unloosed, the great entrance to the upper world is thrown wide open, and they are allowed their freedom to wander once more at their own will wherever they like throughout the whole of the Chinese Empire. So firmly is this belief held by the people of this country, that during the whole of their seventh month in every town and city and almost every village in China, tables are spread out in the open with every ordinary luxury that usually appeals to the Chinese tastes. There are roast chickens and ducks, and ducks’ eggs, and a variety of savoury vegetables, delicately cooked and browned, so that the very look of them makes the mouth water. These are left for hours where only the blue sky looks down upon them, and the hungry spirits that have been famished in their prison-houses tearing up and down, with invisible forms, through the air, feast and feast again upon the good things that the benevolent have spread out for their use.

The Buddhist Church has devised a system by which it can give deliverance to the imprisoned souls without waiting for the seventh moon. They have invented a service which is called “The breaking open the prison doors,” and consists of chanting certain rituals, and going through a lot of mummery, as the result of which the person for whom the service is performed suddenly finds the torturer stay his hand, the saw that had been ruthlessly grinding through his limbs gently and tenderly removed from his body, and with a polite bow he is ushered through the prison gates into the Shadowy Land outside to wander at his own free will, until the sixteen years are up, and he is reborn again into the world in that particular shape that the King may think that he deserves.

This process is a very expensive one and brings in a considerable revenue to the Church, especially when the person who is incarcerated has wealthy relatives on earth. This service reminds one of the practice of which Roman Catholic priests were accused at the time of the Reformation,—of professing, for a consideration, to lighten the pains and sorrows of those in purgatory, which was one of the principal abuses denounced by the Reformers in Germany in the sixteenth century, and has actually been said to have been borrowed from the Buddhists.

With regard to the men who have lived the average life, or who have distinguished themselves for their nobility of character in their previous state of existence, the King sees that they shall be properly rewarded when they pass away from under his jurisdiction. Some of the more noted are born to be kings or mandarins, or men with lofty titles that shall bring them great honours and emoluments. Others, again, become sages or statesmen and famous literary characters, whose writings will influence a nation for many generations. The ordinary rank and file compose the usual members of society that one finds throughout the towns and villages of the Empire, and who are the steady law-abiding citizens upon whom the Government mainly depends for the preservation of law and order.

The usual time of sixteen years that the popular theory gives before a person is again reincarnated into the world may in special circumstances be very considerably shortened. A man or woman, for example, enters the Land of Shadows with a first-class reputation. In some mysterious way the King knows his whole history and is prepared to treat him liberally. After watching his conduct for some time, and marking that he still continues to exhibit the same admirable features that made him a power before he died, he hastens on his rebirth, considering what a loss society in the upper world would suffer from his absence. He is therefore sent back into the world, but never into the same locality from which he originally came. The recollection, moreover, of the scenes and sights and strange mysterious experiences that he passes through in that gloomy, sunless land are all blotted out from his memory. No story is ever told of that life by any one of the countless millions that have come under the sway of “Yam-lo,” the Yama of the Hindoos and the mighty King of Hades, and though men have implicit faith in the myth that the Buddhist Church has propagated, never in the history of the past has any one hinted at any personal experience that he has passed through in any of the many periods in which he must have been a dweller in the land of gloom and twilight.

There is, indeed, the story of an adventure connected with the Shadowy Land that puts one in mind of the Greek hero, who went down to Tartarus in search of his beloved wife who had been torn from him by death, but it appears in a book of fairy tales, and as the writer was a man of a romantic turn of mind no one is inclined to take his statement as sober history.

The story describes how a certain young man had become enamoured of a certain damsel who had bewitched him with her black eyes and her fascinating manners. He had seen her one day as she passed along the street with some girl friends, and he had been so entranced with her beauty, that he had fallen desperately in love with her. So fully had he made up his mind that he could never dream of ever having any one else for his wife, that he was making arrangements to engage a middle-woman to discuss the question of marriage, when he was told that the girl had been taken suddenly very ill, and in a few hours she had died.

The news distressed him beyond measure and almost broke his heart. Pondering over his great sorrow he determined that he would descend into the Dark World and try and discover in what part of China the woman that he had fallen in love with would appear when “Yam-lo” decided to let her return again to earth. With the licence of the romancer, the writer of the fiction declared that he successfully accomplished his purpose, and that the dread King, touched by the devotion he had shown, not only shortened the time of residence of the girl within his dominions, but also managed in some way or other to let him see the “Book of Life and Death,” where the exact date of her rebirth was recorded and the locality where she was to reside. The lover returned to earth, though the writer does not explain how he could do that without a rebirth, which would have obliterated all knowledge of the past, and would have quenched his passion for the girl. At any rate, he leaves the Land of Shadows, and, guided by the information he had obtained there, he proceeds directly to the new home into which she has been born, and after various adventures that belong to the region of fancy and romance she becomes his wife.

No sober writer has ever dared to suggest that the men and women who have travelled into the unknown and mysterious land where perpetual shadows rest, and where the gloomy torture chambers for the unrepentant criminals and transgressors of this world are to be found, ever whisper the secret of what they have seen when they are once more born again into the world. The mystery has been well preserved by the ages, and the Buddhist Church has discreetly kept its own counsel about a matter that every one longs to penetrate, but which countless multitudes for a thousand generations have with absolute unanimity refused to say one word about.

This is all the more remarkable because there is a most passionate desire amongst the living to find out what the inhabitants of the gloomy land are doing, and there is a class of women who get their living by professing to be able to penetrate the mystery and describe what is going on there. These persons resemble very much the Witch of Endor, who is recorded to have called forth the prophet Samuel from the invisible world to predict the calamity that was going to fall upon King Saul in the battle to take place on the morrow.

These women are utterly illiterate, and belong to what may be called the lower middle class of society. They are shrewd and clever, and have a rough persuasive manner with them that commands the belief of the less intelligent women that resort to them to learn about the relatives and friends that have been removed by death. There is the most profound faith in their utterances, for though they do make mistakes and say things about the deceased that are contrary to fact, they so often hit upon real facts that the inquirer, astonished that they should know something that was supposed to be a family secret, at once jumps to the conclusion that they must certainly be inspired by the spirits.

Some of the more famous of these witches are constantly being resorted to by sorrowing relatives, so that they make a very comfortable living, whilst a few lay by money and in time become quite wealthy. But I will here describe one or two cases that have come under my own knowledge as having actually occurred. A lady in respectable society had lost her daughter, who was eighteen years of age. Both the girl and her mother were devotedly attached to each other. The latter, anxious to know how the loved one was faring in the dark country where no sun or moon or stars ever shone, called in a witch that she might describe to her the condition of her daughter.The witch having seated herself, the ancestral tablet that was believed to contain the spirit of the dead maiden was placed upon a high table and several sticks of incense were burned in front of it. The mother then in a loud, clear voice called out the name of her daughter, her age, and the date on which she had died, and she entreated her to come and reply to the questions that the witch was now going to put to her.

The woman, who had been sitting with a stern and stolid looking face as though wrapped in spiritual meditation, now addressed the girl who it was believed had obeyed the summons of the mother. “Is your name Pearl?” “Yes.” “Did you die on such a date and were you eighteen years of age then?” These questions are asked in order to identify her, and to prevent her from being confused with any other vagrant spirit that might have wandered here in order to play a trick upon her.

“Now tell me,” the witch continues, “how are you in the world of darkness, and whether you are happy in your life there.” “Oh! I am pretty well,” is the answer that comes at once in reply to these questions, “but I cannot say that I am very happy. I am continually thinking of how distressed my mother is at my death. I know that she is thinking of me morning, noon and night, and that her heart is full of sorrow because she feels that she will never see me again. With regard to my condition in this gloomy land, it is not all that I could wish, but it is on the whole bearable. I am living in the house that mother had made for me and that was burned at my grave, so that in that respect I have nothing to complain of.”

The question of what friends she has made, is answered by the statement that she lives very much alone and that she knows hardly any one, but that her father, who came into the Land of Shadows some time before her, occasionally visits her, though, singular to say, she makes no suggestion about planning to live with him. It would seem from the popular, though somewhat vague ideas on this subject, that relatives keep strictly apart from each other in that mysterious country, and though they do now and again come and see each other, the intimate relationships that they sustained with one another whilst they were on earth are almost entirely broken off in that other country.

Another very important question was now put to her, viz. “Do you find that your grave is dry or wet?” and she at once replied that she has been quite satisfied as far as that is concerned, for that her mother has evidently taken great pains that the rain or running streams from the higher ground above it shall not flow in upon it. It would seem that the Chinese hold that in some mysterious way the condition of the dead is very largely affected by the wetness or dryness of the grave in which they have been buried. This explains the extreme care with which they select the spots in which to lay their friends that have departed this life.

There is a class of men called geomancers, who get their living by giving their professional opinion as to the suitability or otherwise of plots of land that people have in view to use as graves. There are certain conditions that these must fulfil, or else they will be rejected. One of these is that they must be dry. This specially the case in the South of China, where a wet piece of land would attract the white ants, and in a very short space of time the coffin would be eaten up by them, and worms and noxious insects would then have free access to the body.

But, independent of this disastrous result, damp seems to be a potent factor that affects the happiness of the departed, which not only renders their life more miserable in the other world, but which also induces them in revenge for the want of care of the living to send all kinds of misfortunes upon the homes they have left.