Among the longer and more valuable articles in this work are those on Kwan-yin or "Avalakites'vara," Buddha or "S'akyamuni," "Samadhi," "Sanskrita," "Naga," "Mandjus'ri," "Amitabha," "Dhyana," "Nagardjuna," "Naraka," "Triratna," "Nirvana," and "Trikaya." The spelling here given is that of an author who, somewhat oddly, has followed the French orthography in writing the Sanscrit sounds ch, sh, and j.

The best key to the understanding of Buddhism is to be found in the study of the life of its founder. In Shakyamuni himself humanity is first seen, then divinity. A young prince, handsome, strong, heroic, surrounded by pleasures, and tempted by the most brilliant worldly prospects, is deeply affected by observing the miseries of human life. He becomes a changed man, forsakes his father's palace for a hermit's cell, practises and then teaches a rigid asceticism, and dies at eighty, after a long career occupied partly with the instruction of a numerous band of disciples, and partly with extatic contemplation. He is deified at the moment of death; that is, his disciples elevate him to the summit of humanity, honour him as the best of teachers, and announce that he is for ever rescued from the revolutions of life and death. He has entered the Nirvana, and when his body has been burned, the sharira, or small reddish residuum, is honoured as a sacred relic possessing marvellous powers, and over it a pagoda must be erected.

Such a phenomenon--a great and disinterested mind, founding the monastic institute, and teaching multitudes of both sexes and every caste the escape from sorrow to the eternal rest of the Nirvana--was sufficient in the condition of Hindoo society, as it was two centuries before the expedition of Alexander, to account for the early history of Buddhism. In his account of Kwan-yin (Avalokitesh'vara) our author has gone too far, when he

supposes there was a Chinese divinity of this name before the introduction of the Mahayana into China. Nothing is easier than to attach to the imaginary former lives of the great Bodhisattwas, any incidents of old biography in any age or country, of a marvellous kind, and adapted to be, in the Buddhist sense, edifying. Such incidents were ascribed by the Chinese Buddhists to the presence of Kwan-yin, nearly as in the Earl of Beaconsfield's Lothair the opportune arrival of a Roman shopkeeper's wife, who shows a benevolent interest in the welfare of that hero, is believed by the pope and his cardinal to be an appearance of the Virgin Mary. Hence the author of that romance sarcastically describes Lothair as being for a time, in the opinion of every one in Rome, high and low, "the most favoured man in this century;" yet the net failed to entrap him through his want of faith.