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I had heard very much about the Bogdo Khan before this opportunity to see him. I had heard of his love of alcohol, which had brought on blindness, about his leaning toward exterior western culture and about his wife drinking deep with him and receiving in his name numerous delegations and envoys.

These books are afterwards distributed through all the Lama Monasteries, temples and schools of Bandi. A Maramba read two selections: ". . . The beatific Bogdo Gheghen breathed on a mirror. Immediately as through a haze there appeared the picture of a valley in which many thousands of thousands of warriors fought one against another. . . ."

And what do they see? until late years, just a feeble, untaught child. When the Bogdo dies, his soul is reincarnated in the body of a newly born male child. For a hundred years or more that child has been always Tibetan, not Mongolian; probably the Chinese Government knows why.

They decided, after consulting the old Buddhistic books, that the present Bogdo Khan was to be the last Living Buddha, because that part of the Spirit of Buddha which dwells in the Bogdo Khans can abide only thirty-one times in the human body. Bogdo Khan is the thirty-first Incarnated Buddha from the time of Undur Gheghen and with him, therefore, the dynasty of the Urga Pontiffs must cease.

Prince Djam Bolon described to me some of the contents of this volume. "There exists an ancient wooden Buddha with open eyes. He was brought here from India and Bogdo Gheghen placed him on the altar and began to pray. When he returned from the shrine, he ordered the statue of Buddha brought out.

They changed all the Mongolian ministers and Saits, replacing them with individuals friendly to China; arrested many Mongolian autonomists and sent them to prison in Peking; set up their administration in Urga and other Mongol towns; actually removed His Holiness Bogdo Khan from the affairs of administration; made him only a machine for signing Chinese decrees; and at last introduced into Mongolia their troops.

When the Russian Czar, Alexander I, fell under the influence of Baroness Kzudener and of her extreme mysticism, he despatched a special envoy to the Living Buddha to ask about his destiny. The then Bogdo Khan, quite a young man, told his fortune according to the "black stone" and predicted that the White Czar would finish his life in very painful wanderings unknown to all and everywhere pursued.

This class of Lamas is a very important one, because every important personage visiting the monasteries at Urga is shown to the Lama Tzuren or fortune teller without the knowledge of the visitor for the study of his destiny and fate, which are then communicated to the Bogdo Hutuktu, so that with these facts in his possession the Bogdo knows in what way to treat his guest and what policy to follow toward him.

However, on hearing this the Bogdo Khan himself did some research work and found in the old Tibetan manuscripts that one of the Tibetan Pontiffs was married and his son was a natural Incarnated Buddha. So the Bogdo Khan married and now has a son, a very capable and energetic young man, and thus the religious throne of Jenghiz Khan will not be left empty.

Mysterious country of the cults of Rama, Sakkia-Mouni, Djonkapa and Paspa, cults guarded by the very person of the living Buddha Buddha incarnated in the third dignitary of the Lamaite religion Bogdo Gheghen in Ta Kure or Urga; the land of mysterious doctors, prophets, sorcerers, fortune-tellers and witches; the land of the sign of the swastika; the land which has not forgotten the thoughts of the long deceased great potentates of Asia and of half of Europe: that is Mongolia.