The Buddhist monks are less fanatical and extrava- gant than the Hindu Yogis (q. v.) and Fakirs (q. v.). They depend mainly on fasting, prayer, psalmody, in- tense contemplation, and the use of the whip, to keep their rebellious flesh in sidjjection. See Buddhism; GoT.VMA. They have a fully developed system of mo- nasticism in connection with their priesthood, and a large number of convents; also nunneries for female devotees. The laws of Buddha, it is true, are often purely moral, and they do not profess to be tiie tran- script of a liigher than a human mind. Yet they aimed at reducing the entire company of the faitliful to strictly monastic ride, to the mortification of all human passion, to the separation and isolation of the sexes, to mendi- cancy, and to the cessation and relinquishing of all per- sonal and individual rights. Hence India, thougli she expelled Buddhistic rule, and princes and professors from her soil, yet shows at a hundred points the deep furro^v which Buddhist monasticism has drawn across the more hoary superstitions and more agonizing as- ceticism of Hindu philosophy; and her monuments and literature bear witness to the brave, self-sacrificing de- votion of these sons and daughters of Buddha, and to the fact that they went into all Eastern lands to preach the faith of their sires, to build monasteries, to organize worship, to multiply their sacred books, to perlbrm pil- grimage to holy shrines of their faith, to adore the rel- ics of saints and martyrs, and work miracles by their aid, and to adapt themselves to such var>-ing populations as the cultivated philosophers of Nepaul, the ingenious and susceptible Japanese, the Cingalese, and Burmese, to say nothing of the pontifical empire of Thibet (q. v.),
MONASTICISM
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where, to the present day, the monks still grasp a ] mighty sovereignty, where whole cities are tilled with j mona-stic populations, and where the temples, ritual, in- cense, tonsure, and vestments resemble the mediaival worship of the Komish Church so strongly as to deceive 1 the unwarj'. At the present day the canonization of [ departed worth continually takes place in China, Tar- tary, and Thibet. Tem])les are erected in honor of med- ■ itative and hysteric damsels, who have gone through prodigies of self-sacriiice and communion with the gods, and have entered into their final rest. See Lamaisji. Up to the present century, the learning, tlie science, the art, and literature of China have been largely promoted by the priesthood. The conflict between a caste and a true priesthood, the victory of the "religious order" over the sacred tribe, the triumph of monkerj' over he- reditary privilege, cannot be exclusively claimed for Christian recluses and Catholic corporations. Buddha commenced this mighty strife- six centuries before Christ. Indeed, Buddhist monasticism bears such a re- markable resemblance to that of the Roman Catholic Church that Romish missionaries believed it necessarj' to brand the olJer as a diabolical imitation. But, as has been well said, " The original always precedes the caricature." (See the older accounts of Romish mission- aries to Thibet in Finkerton, Collection of Voymjes and Travels, vol. vii, and also the recent work of Hue, a Trench missionary priest of the Congregation of St. La- zare — Souvenirs d'un Voyatje duns la Tartarie, le Thibet, et la Chine, pendayt les annees 1844-1846, translated into English, and published by the Harpers [N. Y. 1855, 2 vols. I'irao]. Comp. also on the whole subject the two works of R. S. Hardy — Eastern Monuchism, and A Man- ual of Buddhism in its viodem J)evelr>pment, translated from Cingalese MSS. [Lond. 1850]. The striking af- finity between Buddhism and Romanism extends, by the way, beyond monkery and convent life to the hie- rarchical organization, with the grand lama for pope, and to the worship, with its ceremonies, feasts, proces- sions, pilgrimages, confessional, a kind of mass, prayers for the dead, extreme unction, etc. The view is cer- tainly at least plausible, to which the great geographer Carlliitter [Erdkunde, ii, 283-299, 2d ed.] has given the weight of his name, that the Lamaists in Thibet borroweil their religious forms and ceremonies in part from the Xestorian missionaries. But this view is a mere hypothesis, and is rendered improbable by the fact that Buddhism in Cochin China, Tonquin, and Ja- pan, where no Nestorian missionaries ever were, shows the same striking resemblance to Romanism as the La- maism of Thibet, Tartary, and North China. Respect- ing the singular tradition of Prester John, or the Chris- tian priest-king in Eastern Asia, which arose about the 11th century, and respecting the Nestorian missions, see Ritter, I, c. See also Johnson, Mo7iks before Christ, p. 100-108).
4, Organization and Development of non- Christian Mon- achism. — (1.) Indian.— Whut St. Benedict became to the monks of Christendom, Gotama Buddha was to those of India. At least a thousand years before the former enunciated his law from the top of Mount Cassino — that Sinai <r( Western monasticism — Buddha, the Benedict of Eastern monachism, flourished at Kapilawastii. Up to this time Eastern asceticism appears to have been without a settled rule or organization. The Laws of Maim, it is true, specifled the manner of conducting many austere observances, and contain rules for nearly all the monastic obser\'ances, such as the tonsure, fast- ing, celibacy, mendicancy, novitiate, etc.; but each monastery was accustomed to arrange its own inner life, and stood quite independent of any other.