ek adventures far from their
Lamasery; but in general they patiently submit to the punishment
inflicted on them, even that of passing the night in the open air,
without any clothes and in full winter. We often had opportunities of
talking with Chabis, and when we asked them whether there was no means of
learning the prayers without being beaten, they ingenuously and with an
accent manifesting entire conviction, replied, that it was impossible.
"The prayers one knows best," they said, "are always those for which one
has got most blows. The Lamas who cannot recite prayers, or cure
maladies, or tell fortunes, or predict the future, are those who have not
been beaten well by their masters."

Besides these studies, which are conducted at home, and under the
immediate superintendence of the master, the Chabis may attend, in the
Lamasery, public lectures, wherein the books which relate to religion and
to medicine are expounded. But these commentaries are mostly vague,
unsatisfactory, and quite inadequate to form learned Lamas; there are few
of them who can give an exact account of the books they study; to justify
their omission in this respect, they never fail to allege the profundity
of the doctrine. As to the great majority of the Lamas, they think it
more convenient and expeditious to recite the prayers in a merely
mechanical way, without giving themselves any trouble about the ideas
they contain. When we come to speak of the Lamaseries of Thibet, where
the instruction is more complete than in those of Tartary, we shall enter
into some details upon Lama studies.

The Thibetian books alone being reputed canonical, and admitted as such
by the Buddhist Reformation, the Mongol Lamas pass their lives in
studying a foreign idiom, without troubling themselves at all about their
own language. There are many of them well versed in the Thibetian
literature, who do not even know their own Mongol alphabet. There are
indeed a few Lamaseries where the study of the Tartarian idiom receives
some slight attention, and where they sometimes recite Mongol prayers,
but these are always a translation of Thibetian books. A Lama who can
read Thibetian and Mongol is reputed quite a _savant_; he is thought a
being raised above mankind, if he has some knowledge of Chinese and
Mantchou literature.

As we advanced in the Ortous, the country seemed more and more desert and
dismal. To make matters still worse, a terrible storm, solemnly closin