The remarks of Confucianist historians on such things are naturally bitter. It is not according to precedent to praise Buddhism. To censure it is the fashion of the literati. When they wield the historic brush, they deepen the colouring if superstitious emperors and Buddhist successes have to appear on the canvas. What they record of censure they record as a painful duty, and, as often happens when men have a painful duty to perform, they feel more pleasure in the performance than they like to acknowledge.

Towards the end of the thirteenth century, a census was taken by imperial command of the Buddhist temples

and monks in China. Of the former, there were reported 42,318, and of the latter, 213,148. Three years after, at the close of Kublai's reign, when a priest came from "Thibet" (Si-fan) to become kwo-shi (national instructor), the emperor, regretting that he could not converse with him, ordered Kalutanasi, a Mongolian, to learn the Thibetan language from him. This task was accomplished in a year, and, says the narrative, the complete translation of the Buddhist Sutras and Shastras, from "Thibetan" (Si-fan), and Sanscrit into Mongolian, and written in Ouighour characters, was presented to the founder of the Yuen dynasty in the year of his death, A.D. 1294. He ordered it to be cut on blocks, and distributed among the kings and great chiefs of his nation. The notices of Buddhism that occur in the reigns of the successive Mongol emperors are extremely numerous, but they belong perhaps more to Mongolian and Thibetan Buddhism than to that of China, and it will be only necessary, therefore, to take a brief review of them. The recitation of the classics was frequently practised in the Thibetan language in the monasteries of the capital at the emperor's command. In 1324 a second record occurs of the translation into Mongolian of the Buddhist books. It merely says that the translation from the Si-fan (Thibetan) language was then made in the "Ouighour" (Wei-ngu-ri) writing. Those who received the highest religious title, that of kwo-shi or ti-shi, "imperial instructor," were foreigners. One of these, Pi-lan-na-shi-li, of the Kan-mu-lu kingdom, learned in his youth the Ouighour and "Sanscrit" (Si-t'ien, "Western heaven") writing. In 1312 he was ordered by the emperor to translate Buddhist books. From Chinese he translated the Leng-yen-king, a Sutra regarded by the Chinese literati as the best of all the Buddhist books. From Sanscrit he translated four Sutras, and others from Thibetan, in all a thousand "chapters" (kiuen). He was put to death for suspected treason, concerted with the