"La-outze is now worshipped by the Taouists as the third of a trinity of persons, called 'The Three Pure Ones.'
"He is said, when born, to have had long white hair, and is therefore represented as an old man, and called 'old boy.' The Chinese assert that his mother was fed with food from heaven, and that when he was born he jumped up into the air, and said, as he pointed with his left hand to heaven and his right hand to the earth, 'Heaven above, earth beneath: only Taou is honourable.' The Taouist trinity are supposed to live in the highest heaven; and Taouists used to spend a great deal of time in seeking for a drink that they thought would make them live for ever. Subduing evil is by some of them supposed to secure immortality to the soul.
"Their priests are often very ignorant men, but they are believed in by the people, and are employed by them to perform superstitious rites."
"Oh, father! Isn't it a dreadful pity that they should believe so many things like Christians, even in a trinity, and the duty of loving one's enemies, and only be heathens after all?"
"It is indeed; but the more we see of heathens, Sybil, the more we shall notice how they cannot help feeling after truth and grasping some parts of it, which seem as though they were a very necessity to religion. These Taouist priests are often called in by the people to exorcise, or drive away, evil spirits, to cure sick people and commune with the dead."
"Oh, father! I do so like this Peep-show. Please tell us now about the people of the other sect."
A BUDDHIST PRIEST.
"They are the Buddhists, who also worship a trinity; indeed, Taouists are thought to have taken that idea from them. As early as 250 b.c. Buddhist missionaries came over from India to China, but the religion did not really take root until an emperor named Hing, of the Han dynasty, introduced it, in the first century of the Christian era, about 66 a.d. This emperor is said to have seen in a dream, in the year of our Lord 61, an image of a foreign god coming into his palace, and in consequence he was advised to adopt the religion of Buddha, when he sent to India for an idol and some priests. Towards the end of the thirteenth century there were more than 4,200 Buddhist temples in China, and more than 213,000 monks. The Buddhist trinity is called Pihte, or the Three Precious Ones: Buddha Past, Buddha Present, and Buddha Future, and dreadfully ugly idols they are. The Buddhist's idea of heaven is Nirvâna, or rest, or more properly speaking, extinction. The Chinese Buddhist thinks that a man possesses three souls or spirits, one of which accompanies the body to the grave, another passes into his ancestral tablet to be worshipped, and the third enters into one, or all, of the ten kingdoms of the Buddhistic hell, into which people pass after death, there to receive punishments according to the lives they have led upon earth. From the tenth kingdom they pass back to earth, to inhabit the form of a man, beast, bird, or insect, as they may have deserved, unless during life a man has attained to a certain state of perfection, when he mounts to the highest heaven, and perhaps becomes a god or buddha. But even from the Western Paradise a spirit has sometimes to return to earth. Should a man have been good in all the various lives that he has lived, he is supposed to attain, I believe, to this Nirvâna, or extinction."
"What a wonderful belief!" Sybil said. "So they cannot believe at all in the immortality of the soul?"