CHINA. 



249 



Religion, other, cried aloud, " in the heavens and the earth there 

 < ~.~ ^ is no one but myself who deserves to he honoured." At 

 the age of seventeen, he married three wives, by one of 

 whom he had a son, named by the Chinese Mo-heoo- 

 lo ; but at the age of nineteen he abandoned his house 

 and family, with all the cares of life, and committed him- 

 self to the care of four philosophers, with whom he re- 

 tired to a vast desert. Being filled with the divinity at 

 the age of thirty, he was metamorphosed into the Fo, or 

 Paged, as the Indians term it, and immediately thought 

 of establishing his doctrines by miracles, which attracted 

 numerous disciples, and spread his fame over every part 

 of India. When he had attained his seventy-ninth year, 

 and perceived from his infirmities that his borrowed di- 

 vinity could not exempt him from mortality, he is said 

 to have called his disciples together, and to have decla- 

 red to them, that hitherto he had spoken to them by 

 figurative expressions, but that now he would discover 

 his real sentiments, and unveil the whole mystery of his 

 wisdom, namely, that there is no other principle of things 

 but a vacuum, or nothing ; that from this nothing all 

 things at first sprung; that to nothing they shall again 

 return ; and that thus end all our hopes and fears at 

 once. After his decease, a multitude of fables were 

 propagated concerning him by his followers, such as, 

 that he was still alive, and had been born 8000 times, ap- 

 pearing successively under the figure of an ape, a lion, a 

 dragon, an elephant, &c. His last words excited much 

 dissension among his disciples, some of them resolving 

 to adhere to his original tenets, others adopting his con- 

 cluding atheistical view of things, and a third class at- 

 tempting to reconcile both systems together, by making 

 a distinction between the external and internal doctrine. 

 The internal doctrine, to which the disciples of the idol 

 are exhorted to aspire, is a system of the most absurd 

 atheism ; of which some of the principal tenets are, that 

 nothing is the beginning and the end of all things ; that 

 all beings are the same, differing only in figure and quali- 

 ties ; that the supreme happiness of man consists in acqui- 

 ring a resemblance to this principle of nothing, in accus- 

 toming himself to do nothing, to will nothing, to feel no- 

 thing, to desire nothing ; that the sum of virtue and hap- 

 piness is to be found in indolence and immobility, in the 

 cessation of bodily motion, the suspension of all mental 

 faculties, the obliteration of all feelings and desires ; 'hat 

 when men have attained this divine insensibility, they 

 have nothing to do with virtue or vice, rewards or pu- 

 r.ents, providence or immortality, no changes, trans- 

 migrations, or futurities to fear, but have ceased to exist, 

 and become perfectly like the god Fo. The external 

 doctrine has the greatest number of followers. It teaches 

 a great distinction between good a:id evil, and a state of 

 rewards for the good, and of punishment for the wicked 

 after death, in places suited to the spirits of each. It 

 acknowledges the trnnsmigration of the soul through 

 different bodies, till it is at length completely purified 

 and prepared to be united to the Deity. It affirms, that 

 the god Fo came upon this earth to expiate men's sins, 

 and to secure them a happy regeneration in the life to 

 come. Its practical injunctions are simply these : To 

 pray to the god Fo, and to provide his priests with 

 temples and other necessaries, that by their penances 

 and supplications they may procure for his worshippers 

 the forgiveness of their sins ; and to observe five precepts, 

 viz. to kill no living creature to take nothing that be- 

 longs to another to commit no act of impurity to ut- 

 ter no falsehood and to drink no wine. The practice 

 of these duties is enforced by threateiiings of future pu- 



VOL. TI. PART I. 



nishment, especially of transmigration into the bodies of Religio. 

 dogs, horses, rats, serpents, &c. In consequence of this y "" ""Y"^'* 

 doctrine, a multitude of idols have sprung up wherever 

 the religion of Fo has prevailed ; and temples have been 

 erected to quadrupeds, birds, and reptiles of every de- 

 scription, according as the god was imagined to have 

 occupied any of their bodies in the course of his trans- 

 migration. 



Fo is supposed to have lived 500 years before the time 

 of Pythagoras ; and from his followers the Grecian sage 

 is conjectured to have learned the doctrine of the me- 

 tempsychosis, when he travelled in India. The worship of 

 Fo was introduced into China A. D. 69; and is under- 

 stood to have been originally the same as that of the Indian 

 Buddha, from the evident coincidences between the his- 

 tory and worship of the two divinities. The Buddha of 

 the Hindoos was the son of Ma-ya, and one of his names 

 is Amita. The Fo of China was the son of Moy-a, and 

 one of his names is Om-e-to, or, as it is pronounced in 

 Japan, Amida. The Menshin, or guardian spirit of the 

 door in China, is the same as the Gaiiesa of Hindostan ; 

 and, in both countries, his figure, or at least the charac- 

 ter expressing his name, is painted on the door of almost 

 every house. The Lui-shin, or spirit of thunder of the 

 Chinese, represented under the figure of a man with the 

 beak and talons of an eagle, is equivalent to the Vishnu 

 of the Hindoos, who is generally figured as riding upon 

 an eagle, or at least attended by that bird ; and it is no- 

 ticed as a curious circumstance, that the same reason is 

 assigned by the Chinese for giving an eagle's face to this 

 idol, which Pliny adduces for the consecration of that 

 bird to Jupiter, viz. that there is no instance known of 

 an eagle having been killed by lightning. So, Hai-vang, 

 king of the sea, represented in China as reposing on the 

 waves with a fish in his hand, corresponds with the 

 Hindoo Varuna riding on a fish ; and the Indian Ganga 

 or goddess of the Ganges, has an exact counterpart in 

 the Shing-moo or holy mother of the Chinese, which 

 will be described in its place. 



Between the followers of Lao-tse and of Fo, which Religions 

 have always been the two prevailing sects in China, the peecu. 

 greatest rivalship and enmity have constantly subsisted, "' 

 which frequently extended to persecution and blood- 

 shed. Whenever the court or principal eunuchs appear- 

 ed to favour the one in preference to the other ; the 

 more powerful sect at the time commenced hostilities 

 against its opponent. These contests, however, were 

 confined to the priests of the two religions; and the 

 people either remained neutral or took no active part in 

 the quarreX which was seldom terminated but by the 

 levelling of monasteries to the ground, and the slaughter 

 of some thousands of priests on both sides. Since the 

 accession of the Tartar dynasty, no particular preference 

 or distinction has been shewn to either of them ; and 

 indeed, except that the priests of Lama are paid and 

 supported by the Tartar government, as a part of the 

 imperial establishment, and that the principal Tartar 

 officers are attached to their tenets, (separated from the 

 absurdities grafted upon them by the Tao-tse,) the go- 

 vernment gives no particular support to any religious 

 sect whatever. 



About the year of Christ 1070, under the dynasty of Sect of 

 the Song, several learned men applied themselves to in- Sh 

 terpret the sacred books called King ; and one of them tie ' 

 named Shao-kang-tse, distinguished by his superior eru- 

 dition, became the founder or a new system. He taught 

 first of all, that the world had a beginning and will come 

 to an end, when it will be again produced, and agiia de 

 2 I 



