CLOUD EFFECTS ON MOUNT OMI.
By Mrs. Archibald Little.
And could there be a grander grave for a dead man,—the great white mists of Omi his winding-sheet, the Glory of Buddha floating above him his memorial cross, the bosom of Omi's inaccessible precipice his last resting-place? Year by year, day by day, pilgrims kneel, and knock their foreheads on the ground, then hold out hands of supplication over his prostrate form; the bells are struck, the prayers are chanted, the incense burns, above the unburied priest's last resting-place. Never now will hand of man touch him more. He lies secure. He sought to pass away from the contamination of the world, and in pure ecstasy of devotion pass his days in an untrodden cave. And it seems that God—our God, his God, the Lord and Father of us all—accepted the offering without requiring the year-long daily sacrifice. There are no signs of struggle in the orderly disposed garments. It seems as if his spirit passed away as his foot stumbled, and he fell across the fallen tree.
And to make it grander still, he has won no immortal name thereby. The young priest in the temple on the summit says, "That is no unburied saint lies there—only clothes!" He takes us to a neighbouring shrine of his own faith to see a real unburied saint. As we ascended the mountain, we were struck by an image upon an altar from its likeness to a man in its little human imperfections, all covered with gilding though it was, as well as decked out in somewhat tawdry bright embroidered satins. We only noticed, and passed on, repelled by a large and really rather offensively ugly representation of Puhsien standing behind it. The front figure was seated on a large lotus flower, with its legs tucked up underneath it, just as the chief priest at our temple tucked up his legs when he sat to have his photograph taken, putting on his best vestments for the purpose, and looking no longer like an early Christian, without his hood, and with his bald shining head. "There! that was a priest here in the time of Kang Hsi," said the young priest. "It is his very body, not embalmed. It would not decay, and so he was——" Now, did he say canonised? "Few foreigners know of this——" Now, did he say God or saint? So much turns upon a word sometimes, and so few foreigners know Chinese well enough to be clear about these delicate distinctions.
A set of dandies in rich-coloured silks from Kiating, with yellow incense-bags and double purses, invaded the temple, not for the purpose of staring, as we were doing, but to worship. They prostrated themselves, burnt their joss-sticks, and struck the gong before the gilded old man upon the altar just in the same way that they did before the other images. And they looked so picturesque doing this, it seemed a pity to wait to set up the camera till they had gone, and then only to photograph the gilded old man upon the altar and the priest of seventy-one of to-day who ministers before it. The living old man was quite excited by the proceeding, and completely unaware that photography demanded the posture, generally most congenial to a Chinaman, of repose.
Even through all his gilding, the face of the other old man upon the altar gave an idea of holiness, and this in spite of his having as typically slanting eyes as any Chinaman living. Some of his teeth were gone, and his mouth had a little helpless sort of crookedness about it that was very touching. It seemed impossible then and there to hear anything of his history; but it seemed equally impossible, looking at him, to doubt that he had been a good man, a Vicar of Wakefield simple sort of good man, and probably deserved as well to have his body set upon an altar and worshipped as any mere man might. But the place of sepulture of the unburied Taoist priest strikes the imagination as far finer, recalling the grand lines upon the burial of Moses. Angels bore Moses to his sepulchre, we are told. No one has borne the Taoist priest. Even the winds of heaven cannot touch him, as he lies sheltered by the great precipice on which he perished.
"Stars silent rest o'er him,
Graves under him silent.
Here eyes do regard him