distinguished persons are turned into gods or Bodhisattvas in China and Japan is another manifestation of the same spirit.  An ancient inscription[1015] applies to the kings of Tibet the word hphrul which is also used of the Grand Lamas and means that a deity is transformed, or as we say, incarnate in a human person.  The Yellow Church officially recognized[1016] the Emperor of China as an incarnation of Manjusri and the Mongols believed the Tsar of Russia to be an incarnation of the White Tara.

The admixtures received by Buddhism in Tibet are not alien to Indian thought.  They received an unusual emphasis but India provided terrible deities, like Kali with her attendant fiends, and also the idea that the divine embodies itself in human personalities or special manifestations.  Thus Tibetan Buddhism is not so much an amalgam, as a phase of medieval Hindu religion disproportionately developed in some directions.  The Lamas have acquired much the same status as the Brahmans.  If they could not make themselves a hereditary caste, they at least enforced the principle that they are the necessary intermediaries between gods and men.  Though they adopted the monastic system of Buddhism, they are not so much monks as priests and ghostly warriors who understand the art of fighting with demons.

Yet Tibet like Japan could assimilate and transform as well as borrow.  The national and original element in Lamaism becomes plain when we compare Tibet with the neighbouring land of Nepal.  There late Indian Buddhism simply decayed under an overgrowth of Brahmanism.  In Tibet it acquired more life and character than it had in its native Bengal.  This new character has something monstrous and fantastic in government as well as art:  the magic fortresses of the Snowland, peopled by priests and demons, seem uncanny homes for plain mortals, yet Lamaism has the strength belonging to all genuine expressions of national character and it clearly suits the Tibetans and Mongols.  The oldest known form of Tibetan religion had some of the same characteristics.  It is called Bon or Pon.  It would be outside my province to discuss it here, but even when first heard of it was more than a rude form of animism.  In the eighth century its hierarchy was sufficiently strong to oppose the introduction of Buddhism and it possibly contained a pre-buddhist stratum of Iranian ideas.[1017] In later times it adopted or travestied Buddhist dogma, ritual and literature, much as Taoism did in China, but still remained a repository of necromancy, magic, animal sacrifices, devil-dancing, and such like practices, which have in all ages corrupted Tibetan Buddhism though theoretically disapproved.