d love of the monstrous and
terrible, a perpetual endeavour to portray fiends surrounded with
every circumstance of horror, and still more appalling deities, all
eyes, heads and limbs, wreathed with fire, drinking blood from skulls
and trampling prostrate creatures to death beneath their feet.
Probably the wild and fantastic landscapes of Tibet, the awful
suggestions of the spectral mists, the real terrors of precipice,
desert and storm have wrought for ages upon the minds of those who
live among them.

Like demonophobia, the worship of incarnate deities is common in
eastern Asia but here it acquires an extent and intensity unknown
elsewhere. The Tibetans show a strange power of organization in
dealing with the supernatural. In India incarnations have usually been
recognized post-mortem and as incalculable manifestations of the
spirit.[1014] But at least since the seventeenth century, the Lamas
have accepted them as part of the Church's daily round and
administrative work. The practices of Shamanism probably prepared the
way, for in his mystic frenzies the Shaman is temporarily inhabited by
a god and the extreme ease with which 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