Good and Evil of Buddhism.
Sec. 9. Relation of Buddhism to Christianity.

Sec. 1. Buddhism, in its Forms, resembles Romanism; in its Spirit,
Protestantism.

On first becoming acquainted with the mighty and ancient religion of
Buddha, one may be tempted to deny the correctness of this title, "The
_Protestantism_ of the East." One might say, "Why not rather the
_Romanism_ of the East?" For so numerous are the resemblances between the
customs of this system and those of the Romish Church, that the first
Catholic missionaries who encountered the priests of Buddha were
confounded, and thought that Satan had been mocking their sacred rites.
Father Bury, a Portuguese missionary,[92] when he beheld the Chinese
bonzes tonsured, using rosaries, praying in an unknown tongue, and
kneeling before images, exclaimed in astonishment: "There is not a piece
of dress, not a sacerdotal function, not a ceremony of the court of Rome,
which the Devil has not copied in this country." Mr. Davis (Transactions
of the Royal Asiatic Society, II. 491) speaks of "the celibacy of the
Buddhist clergy, and the monastic life of the societies of both sexes; to
which might be added their strings of beads, their manner of chanting
prayers, their incense, and their candles." Mr. Medhurst ("China," London,
1857) mentions the image of a virgin, called the "queen of heaven,"
having an infant in her arms, and holding a cross. Confession of sins is
regularly practised. Father Huc, in his "Recollections of a Journey in
Tartary, Thibet, and China," (Hazlitt's translation), says: "The cross,
the mitre, the dalmatica, the cope, which the grand lamas wear on their
journeys, or when they are performing some ceremony out of the
temple,--the service with double choirs, the psalmody, the exorcisms, the
censer suspended from five chains, and which you can open or close at
pleasure,--the benedictions given by the lamas by extending the right hand
over the heads of the faithful,--the chaplet, ecclesiastical celibacy,
religious retirement, the worship of the saints, the fasts, the
processions, the litanies, the holy water,--all these are analogies
between the Buddhists and ourselves." And in Thibet there is also a Dalai
Lama, who is a sort of Buddhist pope. Such numerous and striking analogies
are difficult to explain. After the simple theory "que le diable y etait
pour beaucoup" was abandoned, the next opinion held by the Jesuit
missionaries was that the Buddhists