440 
JOURNAL OF AN EMBASSY 
of his sovereign or country, deprives a Burman 
of the right of entering the Palace enclosure, and 
is attended with the inevitable consequence of 
the loss of Court favour and preferment. It 
would be no invidious deduction from these 
facts to say, that the religion and customs of the 
Burmese are not calculated to make heroes or 
patriots. This will account for the extraordinary 
conduct of some of the Burmese prisoners who 
were wounded in different actions with us, and 
who refused to suffer amputation ; or tore off 
the bandages, and bled to death after it was per¬ 
formed. One young man who had submitted 
to the operation, mistook the nature of it alto¬ 
gether, and, conceiving that this was our pecu¬ 
liar mode of treating prisoners of war, with the 
passive courage and disregard of life so frequent 
with the people of the East, presented the 
sound leg also for amputation ! These lament¬ 
able prejudices originate from their religious be¬ 
lief. Every physical evil, it must be repeated, 
is considered by the Buddhists as the punish¬ 
ment, not so much of offences committed in the 
present state of existence, as of transgressions in 
some previous migration. They are not consi¬ 
dered as punishments for the benefit of the soul 
of the sufferer, according to the more generous 
and consoling view taken of such cases by our 
