sted. The
creatures of each period, too, whether brute or human, were animated by
but the souls of former creatures embodied anew. In the centre of each
of the three worlds of which a system or _sackwala_ consists, there is a
vast mountain, more than forty thousand miles in height, surrounded by a
circular sea, which is in turn surrounded by a ring of land and rock.
Another circular sea lies outside the ring, and a second solid ring
outside the sea; and thus rings of land and water alternate from the
centre to the circumference. According to the geography of the Buddhas,
a model of our own earth would exactly resemble that old-fashioned
ornament,--a work of the turning-lathe,--which some of my auditors must
have seen roughening the upper board of the ornate parlor bellows of the
last century, and which consisted of a large central knob, surrounded by
alternate circular rings and furrows. And as in the old-fashioned
bellows each ring flattened, and each furrow became shallower, in
proportion as it was removed from the centre, so in the Buddhist earth,
the seas, from being many thousand miles deep in the inner rings,
shallow so greatly, that in the outer rings their depth is only an
inch; while the continents, from being forty thousand miles high, sink
into mere plains, almost on the level of the surrounding ocean. Such is
the geography to which this religion pledges itself. Its astronomy, on
the other hand, is not quite so bad as that to which Father Cullen has
affixed his imprimatur, seeing that, though it gives the same sort of
diurnal journey to the sun, it confers upon it a diameter, not of only
six feet, but of four hundred miles. Nor is its geology a great deal
worse than that of many Christians. It makes the earth consist,
reckoning from its foundations upwards, of a layer of wind, a layer of
water, a layer of substance resembling honey, a layer of rock, and a
layer of soil. Such is a small portion of the natural science of
Buddhism: the minute details of its monstrous cosmogony, with its
descriptions of fabulous oceans, inhabited by fishes thousands of miles
in length, and of wonderful forests abounding in trees four hundred
miles high, and haunted by singing lions that leap two miles at a bound,
occupy many chapters of the sacred volumes. Every form of faith has its
heretics; and there are, it would seem, heretics among even the
Buddhists, who, instead of adopting the nonsense of the priests in this
physical depa