s
curious to observe wings of palaces at Kandy, where a semi-barbaric rule
long held sway, employed now as British administrative offices. Little
antiquity is discernible in the old hill capital, due to former rival
interests of the Portuguese and Dutch. When one nation had control of
the picturesque town, it was customary to efface or demolish everything
that the other had done.

Kandy is the city of Buddha's tooth, and as such is the object of
unbounded reverence with more than four hundred million inhabitants of
the earth. Oudh, where Gautama Buddha died, lacks the sacred importance
of Kandy; and the sepulcher at Jerusalem means no more to Christians,
nor Mecca and Medina to followers of Mahomet.

Kandy was but a mountain village when the holy molar was brought here in
the sixteenth century for safe-keeping. The small temple wherein it was
deposited was beautified and enlarged, and finally the priesthood made
the place their principal seat, and the Kandyan kings later made the
city their stronghold and capital of the country.

Thousands of pilgrims come yearly to offer to the Temple of the Tooth
their gifts of gold and silver ornaments, coins, jewels, vestments for
the priests, even fruits and flowers--and these devotees have traveled
from every hamlet of Ceylon and from every land where Buddha has
believers--from Nepaul, the Malay Peninsula, China, Japan, even from
Siberia and Swedish Lapland. The kings of Burmah and Siam, in compliance
with the wish of their subjects, send annual contributions toward the
support of the temple enshrining the tooth; and Buddhist priests in
far-away Japan correspond with the hierarchy of the temple of Kandy. No
other tooth has the drawing power of this one, certainly.

Strange to say. Buddhism has been cast out from India, where it
originated, by the Hindu faith, which it was meant to reform. In India's
enormous population scarce seven millions to-day worship at Buddha's
shrine. Christianity, as well, is a stranger to the land where it was
born. It appears the irony of fate that these great religions, glorious
in principle, have abiding places without number, save in the countries
where they originated. But such is the fact.

Few scholars can study the tenets of Buddhism without the conviction
that it is a religion of striking merit--that is, as form and dogma are
described by writers and commentators; but as practised by races not far
removed from pagan illiteracy, with whom ido