166 DR. HOOKER’S MISSION TO INDIA. 
chan chains, and Altai ; the principal hordes scattered over which are 
of Turkish origin, and Mahomedans. China supplies them with a 
military force, which occupies all their strong-places, for her own and 
their reciprocal protection. 
With regard to the prevalence of Roman Catholic forms and rites 
amongst a people whose religion is so much older than Romanism, it 
is certainly a curious subject. Boodhism, no doubt, originated,* 
probably as a sort of Brahminism, on this side the Himalaya; the 
Lhassa monks still looking to India, as the region of their most holy 
associations and objects, and their symbols, especially the Lotus, being 
as foreign to a central Asiatic climate as frequent in an Indian one. 
However it may have sprung, it spread at one time all over India, 
equally as throughout eastern and central Asia, the wild mountain tribes 
of the Vindhya and other ranges (especially of the Ghats) alone 
retaining their more barbarous ritual, as they had done when Brah- 
minism first supplanted the aboriginal creeds, and as they still did 
when the Brahmins, under the famous Rama, were re-established, and 
Boodhism was ejected; all of whom (except the heterodox Jains, to 
whom I alluded when writing of Paras Nath) were put down throughout 
India, except Ceylon. 
Some have supposed the Thibetan Boodhists to be indebted to the 
Nestorians for most of their Romanist ceremonies: others attribute all 
to the long-subsequent exertions of the Jesuits. We find the latter, 
however, bitterly lamenting the similarity in the forms of Boodhist 
worship and their own; and very naturally would they do so. The 
Romish ereed is so dependent for its influence over simple minds 
to the imposing ceremonies that accompany it, and especially in its 
attempts to proselytize, that the familiarity of the Boodhists with 
similar forms materially crippled their resources. It appears to me 
not unnatural to suppose that a disposition to monachism may have 
been self-developed, in a scantily peopled and sterile country, where 
the disproportion of the sexes is still so great, that several brothers live 
in harmony with one wife. Such communities of celibates, assuming 
spiritual power in addition to that which mere combination ensures, 
might easily keep the poorer classes in subjection, and be the 
origin of a hierarchy. The mystic nature of the doctrines they 
* This is my friend Hodgson’s opinion, to whom, I need hardly say, I am 
indebted for much of this information, and of what follows. 
