The Sun.
London, England, 1857-11-02 00:00:00

pleasure grounds, where streamlets ripple and some
spots are shady, bat where still that knife-grinding
din pursues us, for—
" Sole sub ardenti resonant arbusta eicadis."

We are borne to the Temple of the Fish Buddha,
where enormous carp grow fat in pleasant ponds.
At least a thousand of them contended for our
votive biscuits, and some of them weighed to a
fisherman's eye quite 401 b.
These temples, however, great as they are in size
and gorgeous grotesqueness, are but as little Welsh
churches compared to the wonders of the " Yun
Liu," the "Cloudy Forest." This is not so much a
temple as a region of temples.
It is suggestive of the scenes of those ancient
Pagan mysteries where the faith and fortitude of
neophytes were tried, and their souls purified by suc-
cessive terrors. It is a limestone district, abounding
in caves and far-reaching dark galleries and myste-
rious internal waters. These natural opportunities
are improved by a priest and an altar in every cave,
gigantic idols cut into the rock in unexpected
places, rays of heavenly light which only the faith-
ful votary ought to be able to see, but which, as
they come through holes bored through the hill,
sceptics sometimes catch sight of ; insot iptions 2,000
years old, but deepened as time wears them. The
place is a labyrinth of carved rock, a happy valley
of laughing Buddhas, and Queens of Heaven, and
squatting Buddhas, and hideous hooknosed gods of
India. There is a pervading smell of fraukincens ,
and the single priest here and there in solitary
places, moaning his ritual, makes the places yet
more lonely ; and through this strange scene you
pass through narrow paths to the foot of the colossal
terrace steps which mount to the temple itself. The
wild birds are flying about this vast echoing hall of
Buddha ; the idols are still bigger and still more
richly gilt, In the great " gallery of five hundred
gods" all that can be done by art, laborious, but
ignorant of beauty, reaches its climax.
The cowled and tonsured bonzes came forth to
greet us. Excellent tea and great choice of sweet-
meats await us in the refectory.
The wonders of this Hangchow Lake deserve bet-
ter description than the objects of these letters will
allow me to attempt. The temple and tomb of the
faithful Minister of State, Yo Fei, occupy acres of
ground and thousands of tons of monumental wood,
tone, and iron. The Imperial palace upon the lake,
with its garden of rockwork and green ponds, its
large library of unused books, its dial metal mirrors,
richly embroidered cushions, and rickettyoldchairs,
opened to us with great difficulty, and under the
immediate pressure of the altnightly dollar. I
hope some one under less imperative obligation to
eschew the merely picturesque and to seek only for
facts which may have practical bearings, may yet
deicribe these objects. My favourite eventise oc-
cupation was to ascend one of these hills and sit at
the foot of one of these halt-burnt pagodas which
stand about like blasted cypress trees and look
down upon the Hangchow. The famous city
lies like a map beneath me. Net a curl
of smoke, not a building more lofty than the or-
thodox two-storied josshouse. I can follow the line
of outer walls and even track the course of the inner
enceinte. Marco Polo says they were 100 miles
round, and a Chinese chronicler records that in a
single conflagration, while Hangchow was yet the
capital of China, 530,000 houses were burned.
These are foolish fables. Hangchow from its posi-
tion never could have been much larger than it now
is. It stands upon a slip of land about three miles
wide, intervening between the river (which is wider
than the Mersey, and has 30 feet of water at low
tide) and this lake. At one end the ground swells
into a hill, over the crest of which the city wall
passes. The shape of Hangchow, therefore, is very
much that of a couch, the hill part being repre-
sented by the pillows, and being the fashionable
part of the city. I can see not only public temples,
but also many of those private ancestral temples,
which are to a Chinese gentleman what the chancel
of his parish church is to au English squire. Little
gardens, perhaps not 40 feet square, full of w eels
and rockwork and little ponds; an oblong pa-
vilion with tablets upon the walls, descriptive of
the names and achievements of the ancestors—
t
kneeling stool, an incense vase, candlesticks, a bra-
zier to burn paper made in imitation of Sycee silver,
and a sacrificial tub—such is a Chinaman's private
chapel. Here he comes on solemn days, and, the
garden being weeded, and all things painted and
renewed for the occasion, he prays and sacrifices to
his ancestors, and feasts with his friends. If the
Chihaman has a superstition that is it. His Budd-
hism is a ceremonial to the many and a speculative
philosophy to the adept, no more. Mr. Edkins's
object in visiting the temples of the lake was to
hold controversy with the priests, so I had more
opportunity of hearing what they really believe
than usually falls to the lot of travellers who
cannot read the Pali books. They did not feel
his arguments against idolatry.' They treat their
grotesque gods with as much contempt as we do.
They divide the votaries into three classes. First
come the learned men who perform the ritual and
observe the abstinence from animal food merely as
a matter of discipline, but place their religion in
absolute mental abstraction, tending to that perfec-
tion which shall fit them to be absorbed into that
something which, as they say, faith can conceive,
but words cannot describe. Secondly come those
who, unable to mount to this intellectual yearning
after purification from all human sentiments, strive
by devotion to fit themselves for the heaven of the
western Buddha, where transmigrations shall cease,
and they.shall for all eternity sit upon a lotus
flower and gaze upon Buddha, drawing happiness
from his presence. Thirdly follow the vulgar, whose
devotion can rise no higher than the sensual cere-
monies, who strike their foreheads upon the steps
of the temples, who burn incense, offer candles
from the tallow tree, and save up their cash for
festival days. So far as my experience goes, this
class is confined almost entirely to oil women, and
the priests say that their one unvarying aspiration
is that at their next transwigcatiou they may be-
come men.
Such is Buddhism as we see it in China. But
this is not all. A Chinese poet who 800 years ago
built an ugly straight down in this beautiful lake
of See-hoo, about the same time invented the Ten
Gods of Hell, and grafted them upon the Buddhist
faith to terriry men from crime. There is also a re-
formed sect of Buddhists who call themselves "Do-
Nothings," and who place the perfection of man
in abstaining from all worship, all virtue and all
vice. When the Jesuit missionaries saw the mitres,
the tonsure, the incense, the choir, and the statues
of the Queen of Heaven they exclaimed that the
Devil had been allowed to burlesque their religion.
We Protestants may almost say the acme. These
reforosel Buddhists deduce their origin from a
teacher who was crucified in the province of
Shantung some 510 years ago, and they shock the
missionaries by blasphemous parallel,. I have heard
that the present Bishop of Victoria investigated this
sect arid sent home an account of them, but, for
some reason, the statement was suppressed.
Then we have the Taoists, or cultivators of per-
fect reason, which is a philosophy having also its
temples and its ceremonies. We have the worship
of Heaven, which is the prerogative of the Empe-
ror, and we have the State roligion, the philosopi y
of Confucius, which is but metaphysics and ethics.
All these may form good subjects of discussion to
laboriously idle men, but they are of very little
practical importance. They are speculations—not
superstitions. They are thought over—they are
not felt. They inspire no fanaticism, they create no
zeal, they make no martyrs, they generate no into-
lerance. They are not faiths that men will fight
for, or die for, or even feel zealous for. -Your Chinese
doctor is a man of great subtlety, of great polite-
ness, but of the coldest indifference. He is a most
pachydermatous beast,. so far as the zeal of the
Christian missionary is concerned, "Do you be-
lieve in Jesus Christ ?" asks the missionary after
long teaching patiently heard. " Certainly I do,"
coldly answers the hearer. " But why do you be-
lieve ; are you convinced ; do you feel that what I
have been saying is true ?" "I believe it because
you say so," is the polite and hopeless answer.
It is this which makes the earnest missionary de-
spond. A Chinaman has no superstition. He has
nothing that can be overthrown and leave a void.
He will chin his joss, burn crackers before he starts
on a voyage, or light a candle for a partner or a
useful clerk who may be in danger of death. But
it's only hope of " good luck" or fear of " bad luck."
The feeling is no deeper than that which in reli-
gious and enlightened England causes so many horse
shoes to be nailed to keep out witches, or which
makes decent housewives, who can read and write,
separate crossed knives, throw pinches of salt over
their shoulder, and avoid walking under a ladder.
Clusteredupon this hill, within the walls of Han g-
chou, are temples of all these varied forms of Pa-
ganism, and perhaps within the year the same
idolater has bowed in all of them. Two lofty green
mounds are perhaps too large for mere private
tombs,worshi p a;nd bu
tmiak the
arm
other spotcases ot
the
e somearch i
tpe
cutbulri
ec
01
thef ro-
sacred and public edifices is all alike, and you can-
not distinguish temples from Custom-houses or
Mandarin offices.

CHAO-HING, Atm. 15.
Having made a careful survey of an environs of
Hangchou, we now determined to attack the city.
With a retinue of 12 chair-bearers and 10 coolies,
who followed with our baggage, we left our boats
during the midday heat, and skirting the border of
the lake reached the wall of the city. Here we shut
ourselves up, and Mr. Edkins, profiting by former
mishaps, instructed the party to avoid the Tartar
part of the city and the Manchoo gate. It was an
exciti❑g moment when the first palanquin passed
und,r the city gate. From behind my exaggerated
f:“.1 could see a far. Chinese official, who was evi-
deutly on duty, but who had his back turned to us. '