It does not need faith, or conviction, or zeal. The monk's life is a quiet one. His work is very light. Nothing is expected of him but orderly conduct, and the chanting of the instructions of Buddha, with invocations and the beating of the wooden fish. The indolent become monks. Of real religious activity there is none. There is no God to worship but Buddha, and Buddha is a teacher, an uncrowned god, in the sense in which Confucius was an uncrowned king.

The monks kneel to adore images, not to pray. When seated in a large hall, they recite together the teachings of their Shakyamuni, it is to favour contemplation and reflection. The reflex influence of the images on their minds is all-important.

Good luck is expected, not through the will of any god, but through an impersonal fate.

Yet they go beyond this, and rest their faith on the legends, with which their books are crowded, relating the powerful interference of the Buddhas and Bodhisattwas; and thus these personages become, in the religious faith of the people, virtual divinities.

If however this is so, there are no printed prayers. If O-mi-to Fo, or Shi-kia Fo, or Kwan-yin p'u-sa, are believed in as gods by the more credulous, the worship is not altered on that account. The monks still read the traditional passages out of the books of Buddha which teach the nothingness of the universe, and seem to be so many sermons on the old text in Ecclesiastes, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity." In the Buddhist literature, prayers with special ends in view, directly addressed to either of these personages, I do not remember ever having seen more than once or twice. There is nothing but praise and invocation in an exceedingly brief form. It is a prayerless and godless religion, if looked at from the Christian point of view.