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 had copied these customs from Nestorian missionaries, who are known to have penetrated early even as far as China.[93] But a serious objection to this theory is that Buddhism is at least five hundred years older than Christianity, and that many of these striking resemblances belong to its earliest period.  Thus Wilson (Hindu Drama) has translated plays written before the Christian era, in which Buddhist monks appear as mendicants.  The worship of relics is quite as ancient.  Fergusson[94] describes topes, or shrines for relics, of very great antiquity, existing in India, Ceylon, Birmah, and Java.  Many of them belong to the age of Asoka, the great Buddhist emperor, who ruled all India B.C. 250, and in whose reign Buddhism became the religion of the state, and held its third Oecumenical Council.

The ancient Buddhist architecture is very singular, and often very beautiful.  It consists of topes, rock-cut temples, and monasteries.  Some of the topes are monolithic columns, more than forty feet high, with ornamented capitals.  Some are immense domes of brick and stone, containing sacred relics.  The tooth of Buddha was once preserved in a magnificent shrine in India, but was conveyed to Ceyion A.D. 311, where it still remains an object of universal reverence.  It is a piece of ivory or bone two inches long, and is kept in six cases, the largest of which, of solid silver, is five feet high.  The other cases are inlaid with rubies and precious stones.[95] Besides this, Ceylon possesses the “left collar-bone relic,” contained in a bell-shaped tope, fifty feet high, and the thorax bone, which was placed in a tope built by a Hindoo Raja, B.C. 250, beside which two others were subsequently erected, the last being eighty cubits high.  The Sanchi tope, the finest in India,[96] is a solid dome of stone, one hundred and six feet in diameter and forty-two feet high, with a basement and terrace, having a colonnade, now fallen, of sixty pillars, with richly carved stone railing and gateway.