1. Obedience to all the preceding precepts and prohibitions, and the performance of all duties fairly deducible from them, such as integrity, gentleness, lenity, forbearance, condescension, veneration to parents and love to mankind in general.
2. Alms-giving and votive offerings. This includes feeding priests, building temples and accommodations for priests and for travelers, making roads, tanks and wells, planting fruit and shade trees, feeding criminals and animals, and finally, giving alms to all classes of men in need.
3. Prayers and reading the Bedegat, or religious books. Of this last kind of merit, there are three kinds: the first is the senseless repetition of prayers and reading; the second, reading intelligently; the last, is performing these exercises with strong desires and feelings. Prayers are not addressed to any God, as there is none existing now for this world. Gaudama, at his death, advised that, in addition to obeying his laws, his relics and image should be worshiped, and temples be built to his honor till the next Boodh came.
Votive offerings of fruit, rice and flowers are made to priests or placed in temples. The prayers consist of the repetition of soliloquies that express our liability to bodily evils and to mental suffering, and our inability to escape. Also of protestations of this kind, [pg 197] “I will not lie;” “I will not steal;” “I will not kill,” etc.
There are four Sabbaths or days for public worship each month, when the people go with votive offerings and prayers to the temple of Gaudama, but they have no general united worship.
The Boodhists have a hierarchy very much like the Catholic church, with varied grades and ranks. The priests are required to practice celibacy, and are mainly supported by voluntary gifts from the people.
They reside in buildings erected especially for them, and as celibacy and the avoidance of women are enjoined on all, these establishments very much resemble Catholic monasteries. Few of the priests preach, and only by special request, after which, presents are made to them. They attend funerals only when invited, and then expect presents. Part of them spend some time in teaching novitiate priests, but most of them, regarding work as unprofessional, spend their time in sheer idleness. It is the rule that each priest perambulate the streets every morning till he receives boiled rice enough for his daily wants. The higher class of priests avoid this. In Burmah the priests are at the rate of one to every thirty persons, and they are well supported by the people, and without interference from the government to enforce it.
As to the motives that sustain this religion, there being no God to the Boodhist, all motives arising from relations and regard to him are excluded. All the motives presented appeal to hope of good and fear of evil to self. Those who attain a certain measure of merit in obeying Gaudama's teachings go to some of the celestial regions, according to their attainments. [pg 198] These consist of twenty-six heavens, one above another, which offer various degrees of enjoyment according to merit obtained.
There are eight principal hells; four that torment with cold and four with heat. In the other hells are other sufferings, although not connected with heat and cold. Worms bite, bowels are torn out, limbs are racked, bodies are lacerated, they are pierced with hot spits, crucified head downward, gnawed by dogs, torn by vultures. These are described with minuteness in the Bedegat and often depicted by the native artists in drawings, reminding one of Dante's Inferno illustrated.
For killing a parent or a priest a man will suffer in one of the hells of fire for inconceivable millions of ages. Denying the doctrines of Gaudama incurs eternal suffering in fire. Insulting women, old men or priests, receiving bribes, selling intoxicating drinks and parricide, are punished in the worst hell.