"A mendicant having received in right time, his meal, returning alone, should sit in private, reflecting within himself; he should not spread out his mind; his mind should be well controlled. Should he speak with a follower of the Buddha or another mendicant, he should speak of the excellent Law, and not backbite or speak ill of another. Some fortify themselves for controversy. We praise not those small-minded persons. Temptations from this source and that are made to cling to them, and they certainly send their minds very far away when they engage in controversy."
The mendicant that Gautama had in his mind when he uttered the above passages, may be as easily discovered amongst the thousands that wear the yellow robe to-day, as a needle in a mountain of hay.
After a short interval the priests put off their robes and return to the world. If they are wanted for corvée or conscription they stay an indefinite period in their safe retreat. The yellow robes are never taken away, but are given by him who is leaving them, to one of the inmates of the same monastery. If a priest is thought to be dying the robes are taken from him, for they must not be contaminated with death. They are afterwards hung on the sacred Bo-tree, but never burned. Anyone who has once been a priest, but has returned to a secular life, may re-enter the priesthood whenever he chooses, but he must be again formally presented and ordained.
In the vicinity of several temples women with shaven heads and white dresses are sometimes seen. They are not always mourners for the dead, but belong to an order of nuns. The first nun was Buddha's foster-mother, who after the death of his father, wished to be ordained. Buddha at first refused to comply with her wishes, but on the intercession of his favourite disciple, Ananda, he granted the request. Ananda's wife, a half-sister of Buddha, was also subsequently ordained as a nun. The order of nuns does not appear to have been at any time half as flourishing as that of the monks. Nuns in Siam are very old widows. They do no teaching, sewing, or work of any description. To them the temple is a form of alms-house where they will be lodged and fed as long as they live.
[CHAPTER XIV.]
AMONG THE TEMPLES.
Every single town and village of Siam is crowded with temples, or "wats," as they are locally called. Compared with similar religious institutions in England, their number seems to be out of all proportion to the number of the population. Their variety of size and method of decoration, as well as their number, is sufficiently conspicuous to make even the most casual observer enquire why they abound to such an extent. And the reason for this superabundance of religious edifices is not to be found in the immense number of people who are popularly supposed to believe in the teachings of Buddha, but rather in a very prevalent, but degraded form of one of the tenets of an originally pure doctrine. For though it is usually stated that five hundred millions of people are believers in, and followers of "The Light of Asia," no one who has lived in a Buddhist country will venture to assert that half that number are regular attendants at the temple on the Buddhist Sunday, or that the vast majority of the people do anything more than passively accept the superstitions of their forefathers without ever enquiring or even caring whether they are the true teachings of Buddha or not. Ask any person you meet a few questions about the sage who propounded the faith that they are supposed to hold, and it will be speedily discovered that even those who are most assiduous in their attendance at the temple, and who are most charitable in the offerings they give to their priests, know little of the life and less of the teachings of him whom they apparently worship. It will be at once evident to the readers of the foregoing chapters of this book, that the people whose customs are here treated of, though nominally Buddhists, and classed en masse as such in Western calculations of the number of those who worship the great Indian teacher of old, are guided in their daily lives, not by the principles of an old world faith, but rather by a number of powerful superstitions gathered at different times from the different nations by whom they are surrounded, or with whom they have come into close contact, which superstitions have little if anything to do with Buddhism. It is not possible to call them Buddhists at all, if the term is to be used as comparable to the term Christian as applied to the believers in Christ in Western lands. The great moral precepts of their religion are not taught to them, are unknown to them, and it is very questionable if the Sanskrit words for benevolence, gratitude, charity, and kindred virtues have any parallel in the ordinary everyday vocabulary of the people. Even if such words do exist, they are only understood by the learned few, and would be as utterly incomprehensible to the great mass of the people as Greek and Latin.
