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Updated: May 19, 2025
The Lama, though one of the red sect, was dressed in a yellow flowered silk robe, but his mitre was red: he gave us much information relative to the introduction of Boodhism into Sikkim. The walls are immensely thick, of well-masoned slaty stones; the outer surface of each slopes upwards and inwards, the inner is perpendicular.
Their physiognomy is however so Tibetan in its character, that it cannot be supposed that this was their earliest intercourse with the trans-nivean races: whether they may have wandered from beyond the snows before the spread of Boodhism and its civilisation, or whether they are a cross between the Tamulian of India and the Tibetan, has not been decided.
Will he maintain that the populations of India, in the midst of whom one of the most subtile and ingenious systems of pantheism has sprung up with the luxuriance and involutions of one of their own jungles, and has enervated the whole religious sentiment of the Hindoo race as opium has enervated their physical frame, will he maintain that such an untiring and persistent mental activity as this is incapable of apprehending the first principles of ethics and natural religion, which, in comparison with the complicated and obscure ratiocinations of Boodhism, are clear as water, and lucid as atmospheric air?
Besides all that would be expected from a numerous and deeply interested priesthood, we have had the fierce and violent opposition of a young prophet, who started up just before my arrival, and is located about a mile from me. He renounces a little of Boodhism and adds some other things; is unlettered and of no marked character; and yet he has many very devoted adherents.
They were formerly very wealthy, but during the Nepal war they were plundered of all their treasures, their silver gongs and bells, their best idols, dorjes, and manis, and stripped of their ornaments; since which time Pemiongchi has been more popular. In proof of their antiquity, it was pointed out that most of the symbols and decorations were those of pure Lama Boodhism, as practised in Tibet.
Both Lepchas and Limboos had, before the introduction of Lama Boodhism from Tibet, many features in common with the natives of Arracan, especially in their creed, sacrifices, faith in omens, worship of many spirits, absence of idols, and of the doctrine of metempsychosis.
The origin of the Jain sect is obscure, though its rise appears to correspond with the wreck of Boodhism throughout India in the eleventh century.
Place the imbruted outcasts of our metropolitan population beside the Indian hunter, with his belief in the Great Spirit, and his worship without images or pictorial representations; beside the stalwart Mandingo of the high table-lands of Central Africa, with his active and enterprising spirit, carrying on manufactures and trade with all the keenness of any civilized worldling; beside the native merchants and lawyers of Calcutta, who still cling to their ancestral Boodhism, or else substitute French infidelity in its place; place the lowest of the highest beside the highest of the lowest, and tell us if the difference is so very marked.
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