pole on his shoulder with one shoe suspended on it. The story is that, on crossing the Yang-tsze keang, he dropped the other, which was picked up by a countryman, and was found to possess wonderful powers. Manjusiri is seated on a sea demon. A tiger is whispering at his ear. He thus learns what people at a distance are doing. It should be remembered that the attribute of this great Bodhisattwa is wisdom. In the same representation Kwan-yin sits on some other sea animal. He is pouring the elixir of life from a gourd. As it flows out it becomes the genius of a star.

There is no difficulty felt by the arrangers of temples in placing the Bodhisattwas among the Arhans, because they have all necessarily passed through that state before arriving at their present position. So the Arhan is only such after passing through three grades of discipleship, which are the first steps on the road to the Nirvana. The Buddha himself must go through all these stages from the first introduction to the sacred life up to the state of Bodhisattwa. They form the ladder from the actual world of human life to that cloud-land of abstractions which the contemplative Buddhist hopes to reach at last. In accordance with this, the hermit life of Shakyamuni Buddha is depicted on the walls of the same temple. Above the eighteen Arhans just described, is a representation, in painted clay, of the Himalayas. Here is seen a hut of rushes inhabited by the future Buddha. Monkeys and sacred geese bring him food, and dragons, tigers, and white rabbits are his near neighbours.

In the third monastery, high on the hill called Fo-ting shan, is a somewhat remarkable representation of the Hindoo gods. They are presided over by Yu-hwang of the Brahma heaven. I could not, however, obtain an intelligent account of them from the illiterate priest who was residing there. He was an artisan from Kieu-kiang in Kiang-si, who had left his wife and family in charge of his eldest son, and become a monk.

At another smaller temple, where there are several caves, each with one or more small stone Buddhas seated inside, shown to visitors as emblematic of the hermit life, I found a young priest very ready to defend his system. When the worship of Buddha was objected to, on the ground that it substituted the creature for the Creator, he replied that Shakyamuni Buddha, being at the head of the Hwa-tsang universe, was far higher in dignity than He who ruled this lesser universe. He was reminded in reply that the vast Hwa-tsang-shi-kiai, a congeries of an immense number of lesser worlds, was nothing but an invention of the author of the Hwa-yen-king, and that in reality there was no existence or world not included within the dominions of God. He did not attempt to continue the argument.