Buddhist priest

“ The Buddhist priest, T‘i-k‘ung, relates that when he was at Ch‘ing-chou he saw two foreign priests of very extraordinary appearance. They wore rings in their ears, were dressed in yellow cloth, and had curly hair and beards. They said they had come from the countries of the west; and hearing that the Governor of the district was a devoted follower of Buddha, they went to visit him. ”

“ Buddhist Priest Preaching at the Door of a Temple.
[Pg 161]
Monastic orders first arose among the Buddhists, and as caste was abolished the monasteries were open to all men, and even to women, who were bound over to celibacy and self-renunciation. These Buddhist priests went about preaching their new religion to the common people, and found ready acceptance with them. Barefooted, with shaven heads, eyebrows, and chins, wearing a yellow dress instead of the pure white robes of the Brahmans, they seemed indeed lower than the lowest Pariahs. ”

“ Buddhist priests are not popular with the Chinese, who make fun of their shaven heads, and doubt the sincerity of their convictions as well as the purity of their lives. "No meat nor wine may enter here" is a legend inscribed at the gate of most Buddhist temples, the ordinary diet as served in the refectory being strictly vegetarian. A tipsy priest, however, is not an altogether unheard-of combination, and has provided more than one eminent artist with a subject of an interesting picture. ”

“ We have also learnt, that the term ‘priest’ is not suitably applied to Buddhist monks. For true Buddhism has no ecclesiastical hierarchy, no clergy, no priestly ordination; no divine revelation, no ceremonial rites, no prayer, no worship in the proper sense of these terms. Each man was a priest to himself in so far as he depended on himself alone for internal sanctification. ”

“ This is the very real illustration in the living priest, of the pictorial representation of the priest of the Buddhist religion given above! The Buddhist system is devoid of hope, pity, consolation, or even ordinary human sympathy. It is as heartless as its own stony or brazen images of Gautama so universally worshiped. Men become like their gods. ”

“ Sun then asked them three times if they would liberate the priests. When they finally refused, he grew very angry, took his magic spear from his ear and brandished it in the air, when all their heads fell off and rolled on the ground.
Anger of the Buddhist Priests The Buddhist priests saw from a distance what had taken place, and shouted: “Murder, murder! The Taoist superintendents are being killed.” They surrounded Sun, saying: “These priests are our masters; they go to the temple without visiting the King, and return home without taking leave of the King. The King is the high priest. ”

“ It is only the fact of the resemblance that admits of no dispute.
A Buddhist Priest. It is curious to notice the different effects produced by an observation of the Buddhist ceremonial on the minds of Roman Catholic missionaries upon their first arrival in the East. By some its likeness to their own ritual has been regarded as a manœuvre of Satan, designed for the hindrance of Christian truth; while others have regarded the resemblance with satisfaction, as calculated to diminish the difficulties of their work. ”

“ Returning to Buddhism, if a priest has a son he may be succeeded by him. But many Buddhist priests marry late and have no children. Or their children do not want to be priests. So the priest adopts a successor. Sometimes he maintains an orphan as acolyte or coadjutor. During the day this assistant goes to school. In the evenings and during holidays he is taught to become a priest. When the primary-school education is finished the lad may be sent by his patron, if he is well enough off, to a school of his sect at Kyoto or Tokyo. ”

“ He then worships before the sacred shrine of Buddha, the sacred books, and the [Pg 353] assembled priests. He next makes a request to the chief priest to renew his covenant to observe the five rules of the Buddhist religion. These are, first, that he will not take the life of any man or other sentient creature; second, that he will not oppress any man; third, that he will not take to wife any woman belonging to another, while there is the least unwillingness on the part of the woman, or of her parents or of her guardians, to the transaction ”

“ This sounds luxurious, but by rule the Buddhist priests should live the most abstemious lives. They are supposed to have no money or possessions of their own, and to be entirely celibate. Each morning they go out96 with their begging bowls on their arm to get their daily food. They go to a house and stand near the door, asking nothing. Then presently the woman comes out and puts a little rice in the bowl, and the priest goes on to the next house. ”

“ At death, the priest is placed in a chair, his chin supported by a crutch, and then put into a wooden box, which on the appointed day is carried in procession, with streaming banners, through the monastery, and out into the cremation-ground attached, his brother priests chanting all the while that portion of the Buddhist liturgies set apart as the service for the dead, but which being in Pali, not a single one of them can understand. There have, of course, been many highly educated priests at one time and another during the long reign of Buddhism in China ”

“ I am far from being an admirer of the Buddhist priesthood; they are generally an imbecile race, and shamefully ignorant of everything but the simple forms of their religion, but nevertheless there are many traits in their character not unworthy of imitation. ”

“ China and Japan, as well as Malaysia, offer many examples of Buddhist priests, or Bonzes, who have boys attached to the service of the temples. It is the duty of each priest to educate a novice to follow him in the ceremonies, and it is known that the relations between the two are often intimate physically. ”

“ At the third or fourth invocation he fell out of the giant’s sleeve, whereupon the latter picked him up and put him back; but this happened several times, and at length the giant, wearied of picking him up, let him lie where he was. The soul lay there for some time, not knowing in which direction to proceed; however, it soon recollected that the land of Buddha was in the west, and westwards accordingly it began to shape its course. In a little while the soul came upon a Buddhist priest sitting by the roadside, and, hastening forwards, respectfully inquired of him which was the right way. ”

“ Prayers and ceremonials were sold. If a priest won renown by zeal and devotion, a crowd of sordid followers attached themselves to him, perverting his fame into an instrument of gain. Abbots bought the privilege of calling their temple the repository of some nobleman's mortuary tablet in order that they might blazon his crest on the furniture and curtains of the chancel. Many priests of noble character, profound piety, and wide erudition still upheld the best traditions of the creed, but the general moral level of the Buddhist clergy fell to an exceedingly low point. ”

“ Buddhism in China, as in Japan, it may also be observed just here, is now only a hideous mixture of superstition and fraud. As I found believers in the Japanese temples rubbing images of men and bulls to cure their own pains, so in the great Buddhist temple at Canton I found the fat Buddha's body rubbed slick in order to bring flesh to thin supplicants, while one of the chief treasures of the temple is a pair of "fortune sticks." If the Chinese Buddhist wishes to undertake any new task or project, he first comes to the priest and tries out its advisability with these "fortune sticks." ”

“ The religious spirit of the people prompts them to dedicate the most beautiful spots and nooks to the gods, and there to erect shrines and idols.
Buddhist priests dress in robes not very unlike the official robes of the Episcopal clergy. Their heads are always close-shaven, a mark by which they are easily distinguished. ”

“ If from heathen America we turn to Asia, we find that in the vast domain of the Buddhist faith the birth of children is regularly the occasion of a ceremony at which the priest is present (R. B. vol. i. p. 584,) and that in Mongolia and Thibet this ceremony assumes the special form of baptism. Candles burn, and incense is offered on the domestic altar; the priest reads the prescribed prayers, dips the child three times, and imposes on it a name (R. B. vol. ii. p. 320) . A species of baptism prevails also among the Parsees, and was even enjoined by the Parsee Leviticus, the Vendidad. ”

“ Buddhist priests have no official rank, nor are their temples graded. They live on the contributions of their parishioners and on the income derived from lands that were of great extent and large wealth-yielding capacity until the Government of the Restoration reduced their area to a mere fraction of its original dimensions. ”

“ Buddhist priests and nuns live apart from other people in monasteries and nunneries. They wear a different costume, and have their heads entirely shaven. They live on a vegetable diet, and obtain their food by their chants, by singing masses and often by begging. People believe that wealth, happiness and longevity can be procured through them, and so, according to their means, they offer these priests and nuns money with which to buy68 incense for Buddha and oil to burn in his lamps, also that a number of prayers shall be offered up in their behalf. ”

“ One of the first duties of a missionary should be to learn thoroughly the religion of the people of the country to which he is sent. An acquaintance with Buddhism, and its tenets and principles, would have been a very powerful weapon to convince or to condemn these priests, without trying to hold them constantly up to the scorn of their own people and followers. From the commencement of the Romish missions a continued aggressive action appears to have been kept up against the Buddhist priesthood as individual men. ”

“ Buddhist priests are renouncers of the world, living in monasteries as homeless ascetics, unconcerned with secular affairs. They have neither the will nor the endeavour to bring and keep the royal power under their control through the threat of curses or magic arrows. Even if there were any remnant of such a will, its fulfilment has now become an impossibility. For Buddhism has shaken the thrones of all the oblation-eating gods and brought them down from their heavenly positions. ”

“ Had there been no priests to mould the religious ideas of the neighbouring villages into a Buddhistic form the tree would still have been regarded as the abode of a spirit, but no one would have thought of suggesting that the spirit was that of a Buddha. The devout Christian need not jeer at the harmless wiles of the Buddhist priests in this little matter, for the European monks of the Middle Ages were equally ready to seize upon local superstitions and give them a Christian interpretation. "The peasant folk-lore of Europe still knows," says Dr. ”

“ Our forefathers were not aware that, centuries before the incarnation of our Lord, the Buddhist priests had held exactly the same theory of moral retribution; and that painted on the walls of Buddhist temples might be seen horrors identical with those which adorned the walls of many a Christian church, in the days when men believed in this Tartarology as firmly as they now believe in the results of chemistry or of astronomy. ”

“ They aver that invariably something is taken from this table, showing that the soul of the departed has actually come back, and has consumed a portion of the food in order to manifest its return. During the lying-in-state, Taoist or Buddhist priests are called in to say mass, and to perform other religious rites, and more often than not nuns are also in attendance. ”

“ The Buddhist priests, like the Hindu priests, are drawn mostly from the comparatively uneducated masses, but there is no need in their case that they should be Brahmans. A vast tolerance, and gentleness towards all forms of life, characterises the Buddhist institutions; but in the present day in Ceylon the institutions are decadent, and the priests, with a few exceptions, are an ignorant and incapable set. ”

“ Many of the priests of the Buddhist faith are doubtless, judged by its laws, good and true men, and the majority are hospitable, and civil to strangers. They seldom neglect, however, to let one know the value of the presents they have received from other foreigners who, on previous occasions, have visited their abodes. ”

“ And it is the Trinity thus formed, which, represented to-day by the three great images above the altar of many a Buddhist temple, has its multitude of ignorant worshippers, who doubt not that three several divinities are the objects of their adoration and their prayer.
Such, then, as would appear, was the origin of Buddhism. Strictly speaking, and apart from its later developments, Buddhism is a religion which knows no God, which attaches no value to prayer, which has no place for a priesthood. ”

“ Buddha endeavoured to emancipate his fellow-men from faith in the efficacy of a priesthood to mediate between men and Deity, or to secure deliverance. He never dreamed that either temple or priest would arise in his system; but the temple grew naturally out of the dagoba and the relics which it enshrined, and the priesthood as naturally was evolved from the Sthavira or senior Bikkhu. In Southern Buddhism the priest is more like a Protestant minister of religion than like a priest in the Romish sense of the word ”