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Updated: May 25, 2025
The more praying-wheels you turn, the more bells you ring, the greater the merit. One of the monks is always at work turning the big wheel that moves the bell, so as to heap up merit night and day for the monastery." This set me thinking. I soon discovered that, no matter how the wheel is turned, the Karma or merit is equal. It is the turning it that counts, not the personal exertion.
They are accompanied by a few women and children. They take their religion with them in their praying-wheels, which they keep going. They are an intensely religious people, as Mr. Gilmour tells us, but it is in the most mechanical fashion which can be conceived.
If they were mere machines, wound up like their praying-wheels, they could not to all appearance be more devoid of thought, feeling, and conscience in the exercise of their religion. I marked their countenances, and could only wonder at their stolid look. Much that is absurd is found in man's religion, but the Tibetan form of it seemed to me the very ne plus ultra of irrationality.
In the cultivated valleys, where barley, buckwheat and mustard grew, there were everywhere evidences of the religious feeling of the Western Bhutanese. Every hill was crowned with a gompa or chapel, chortens and praying-wheels stood beside the road, and mendongs or praying-walls, a mile long, their stones engraved with sacred words, were built near habitations.
Booddhism in some form is the predominating creed, from Siberia and Kamschatka to Ceylon, from the Caspian steppes to Japan, throughout China, Burmah, Ava, and a part of the Malayan Archipelago. Its associations enter into every book of travels over these vast regions, with Booddha, Dhurma, Sunga, Jos, Fo, and praying-wheels.
The shops are filled mainly with ordinary Chinese wares, and my efforts to find some Tibetan curios were fruitless, those shown to me being of little value. I imagine it is a matter of chance if one secures anything really worth while. At any rate, neither the quaint teapots nor the hand praying-wheels that I was seeking were forthcoming.
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