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Updated: May 6, 2025
Three stories of light belfry-like temples, three upon each side of the square, surmounted each other in rows; in the centre was a mass of architecture between a dome and a spire, rising to a height of upwards of 100 feet above the level of the court: the whole formed a pyramidal structure ornamented with fantastic devices, and undoubtedly Bhuddist in its character.
Sometimes it is turned by hand and sometimes attached to a wind-mill; the latter mode being preferred. Abbe Hue and others have remarked a striking similarity between the Bhuddist and Roman Catholic forms of worship and the origin of the two religions. Hue infers that Bhuddism was borrowed from Christianity; on the other hand, many lamas declare that the reverse is the case.
Professor KEANE once more comes to our assistance, and solves the question by suggesting that the Mongolian Malays from High Asia who settled in Sumatra, attained there a real national development in comparatively recent times, and after their conversion to Mahomedanism by the Arabs, from whom, as well as from the Bhuddist missionaries who preceded them, they acquired arts and an elementary civilization, spread to Borneo and other parts of Malaysia and quickly asserted their superiority over the less advanced portion of their race already settled there.
The story of the unexpected arrival of a Presbyterian missionery in the midst of her coronation feast is too well known to repeat and the tale of the landing of eight Bhuddist monks during the christening of her first child is now so hackneyed as to be irritating; therefore we will skip the minor incidents of the early part of her reign and mention a few of the progressive improvements on existing conditions which found their source in her tireless and fertile brain.
There is no character to work upon in the Cingalese: they are faithless, cunning, treacherous, and abject cowards; superstitious in the extreme, and yet unbelieving in any one God. A converted Bhuddist will address his prayers to our God if he thinks he can obtain any temporal benefit by so doing, but, if not, he would be just as likely to pray to Bhudda or to the devil.
Besides the Ghorkas and Newars there are two or three other tribes, each consisting of but a limited number, and possessing no peculiar distinguishing marks, except the differences to be found in their religious opinions, which are generally a mixture of the Bhuddist and Hindoo creeds. But to return to the temple of Pusputnath.
This remarkable building was visible some time before we reached it, and is of the form peculiar to Bhuddist places of worship in other parts of the world, but more particularly in Anuradhupoora and the ancient cities of Ceylon, the ruins of which bear testimony to the existence of larger Dagobas than that before which the followers of the Bhuddist faith worship in the valley of Katmandu.
From this point we gazed with indescribable delight on the valley so peculiar if not unrivalled in its beauty: its compact red-brick villages or straggling houses, which, with their quaintly-carved gables, clustered up the hillsides; its sacred groves containing numerous venerated shrines in picturesque proximity to the clear streams that gushed down from the neighbouring hills; its ancient cities, whose dismantled walls enclosed the ruined tenements of a departed race; the richly-cultivated knolls, the Chinese pagodas, the Bhuddist dagobas on the banks of the sacred Bhagmutty, the narrow but substantially-built brick bridges by which it was spanned, continually traversed by an industrious population; all these objects formed a picture, "with all the freshness and glory of a dream," to which the towering monument of Bheem Singh in the far distance, while it indicated the position of the capital of this favoured vale, was a fitting centre.
There were also ruined pyramidal shrines of no known architecture, and difficult to describe from their complicated nature antique specimens of the masonry of ages long gone by, and memorials of a religion doubtless impure, although Bhuddist in its character and origin.
To have the battle fairly fought out, Spinoza, or a Bhuddist, or a Burmese Gymnosoph, should be challenged. Then, I am deeply persuaded, would the truth appear in full evidence, that no Christ, no God, and, conversely, if the Father, then the Son. I can never too often repeat, that revealed religion is a pleonasm. Religion is revelation, and revelation the only religion. Ib. p. 37.
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