________________
BUDDHA AND BUDDHISM.
373
the Khalkas and in its vicinity, there were, it is said, thirty thousand Lamas, the head of whom exercised the temporal as well as spiritual authority of the whole country, and was an object of uneasiness to the court of Pekin. In the province of which Lhassa, the acknowledged bigh seat of Lamaism, is the capital, there were said to be three thousand monastic establishments, in three of which, Khaldan, Prebung, and Sera, there were in each fifteen thousand Lamas. The missionaries estimate the Lamas at one-third of the whole population; all the males of a family, except the eldest, being expected to enter the order, at least for a term; it being allowable in Tartary, as well as in other Buddhist countries, for a member of a monastery to return to active life. Every monastery has its Superior, who is very commonly originally a boy brought from Tibet, being supposed to be the late principal regenerated; he being, in fact, as before observed, a Buddha on his way to perfection.
The vast number of the Lamas of Tartary and Tibet naturally suggests the inquiry, how countries so poor, upon the whole, and thinly peopled, can support so large a proportion of unproductive meinbers. Some of their subsistence is derived from grants and endowments made by the Emperors of China, whose policy it has been to encourage Lamaism, as tending to keep down the population, and repress the martial spirit of the nomadic tribes: further means are supplied by the people, who are a simple and credulous race, and who, although not animated by any devotional fervour,
