TEMPLE. 
197 
broad platform, a few feet above the water, and at ascending by an 
easy flight of steps to the first division of the temple; an ample 
cavern, cold, dark, and dismal. A few grinning bonzes, with bare 
heads and long cloaks, received us at the entrance, and conducted us 
through the vault up another flight of steps to the second story. 
Here we again looked round on the bare rock projecting abruptly 
into a capacious but gloomy apartment. At an opening in its front 
which was suspended a glass lanthorn of prodigious size made in London, the offering of 
an opulent Chinese bigot at Canton. From hence we mounted by an ascent of many 
difficult steps to the temple itself, which is directly over the hall, but of much greater 
extent. Here the god Pusa is displayed in all his glory, a gigantic image with a Saracen 
face, grinning horribly from a double row of gilded fangs, a crown upon his head, a naked 
cimetar in one hand, and a firebrand in the other. But how little, alas! is celestial or 
sublunary fame ; I could learn very few particulars of this colossal divinity : even the 
Bonzes, who live by his worship, scarcely knew any thing of his history. From the attri- 
butes he is armed with, I suppose he was some great Tartar prince or commander of anti- 
quity; but if he bore any resemblance to his representative, he must have been a most 
formidable warrior, and probably not inferior in his day to the king of Prussia or prince 
Ferdinand in our own. A magnificent altar was dressed out at his feet, with lamps, lan- 
thorns, candles and candlesticks, censers and perfumes, strongly resembling the decorations 
of a Romish chapel, and on the walls were hung numerous tablets inscribed in large cha- 
racters, with moral sentences and exhortations to pious alms and religion. 
“ Opposite to the image is a wide breach in the wall, down from which the perpendicular 
view requires the firmest nerves and the steadiest head to resist its impression. The con- 
vulsed rocks above shooting their tottering shadows into the distant light, the slumbering 
abyss below, the superstitious gloom brooding upon the whole, all conspired to strike the 
mind with accumulated horror and the most terrifying images. From the chapel we were 
led through several long and narrow galleries to the rest of the apartments, which had 
been all wrought in the rock, by invincible labor and perseverance, into kitchens, cells, cel- 
lars, and other recesses of various kinds. The Bonzes having now heard the quality of 
their visitors, had lighted an additional number of torches and flambeaux, by which we 
were enabled to see all the interior of the souterrain, and to examine into the nature of 
its inhabitants, and their manner of living in it. Here we beheld a number of our fellow 
creatures endowed with faculties like our own, (“ some breasts once pregnant with celestial 
fire”) buried under a mountain, and chained to a rock to be incessantly gnawed by the 
vultures of superstition and fanaticism. Their condition appeared to us to be the last 
stage of monastic misery, the lowest degradation of humanity. The aspiring thoughts 
and elegant desires, the Promethean heat, the nobler energies of the soul, the native dignity 
of man, all sunk, rotting, or extinguished in a hopeless dungeon of religious insanity. 
From such scenes the offended eye turns away with pity and disdain, and looks with im- 
patience for a ray of relief from the light of reason and philosophy.” Journal of an 
Embassy to China by Lord Macartney, p.374. 
