xxxviii INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. 



since the invasion of Tibet in 1643, by the Mongol Gushi 

 Khan, who depressed the Reds, and established the Dalai 

 Lama as temporal sovereign of the greater part of Tibet, 

 no such equality exists. The chief prelates of the Red 

 sects in Tibet Proper, in Bhotan, and in Ladak, have now 

 long been in a kind of dependence on the Yellow papacy, 

 and are, both in Lhassa and in Peking, counted among the 

 KhutiikJitits or Monsigjiori of the Lamaitic hierarchy. I 

 have no doubt that Rome, so fertile in analogies with 

 Lamaism, could furnish a perfect parallel ; but the nearest 

 that occurs to my scanty knowledge is the position of the 

 priests of the Greek rite in Sicily, or that which a high 

 Catholic prelate Avas recently alleged to have desired to 

 recognise in certain would-be deserters of the Church of 

 England. 



The KJmUikhtus, — Monsignori, as I have just called 

 them, or perhaps Cardinals, as Pere Hue himself calls 

 them, — form the second order in the hierarchy, and in Tibet 

 Proper, like the Roman cardinals up to 1870, they hold the 

 civil administration of the provinces in their hands. They 

 also are counted among reincarnate saints. The best 

 known of them is that patriarch of Mongolia who, since 

 1604, dwells at Urga, the most powerful and revered of all 

 the Lama hierarchy after the Two Jewels of Central 

 Tibet.^ Next to him is the second Mongolian patriarch, 

 dwelling at Kuku Khoto ; Avhilst a third represents 

 Lamaism at the Court of Peking. 



After these come the commoner herd of re-incarnates, 

 \vho are numerous, insomuch that a great many monasteries 

 in Mongolia and Tibet have an incarnate saint, or * Livine 

 Buddha,' as they are sometimes called by travellers, for 

 their abbot. These are the CJuiberons of Hue ; the Gige?ts 

 of Prejevalsky. And the Red-caps themselves, who in 

 former times admitted of succession by natural descent, 



have now adopted this supernatural system.- | 



5 

 * ^ See Prejevalsky, i. pp. 11-13. This is the personage wljom Hue 



calls Guison Tiiinba. i 



* P. Armand David tells a curious story of the ' living Buddha ' of 



