Chinese, their neighbours. Their language is monosyllabic,
their religion Buddhist, their government a despotic empire, and at the
time the mission was entered upon they had had little intercourse with
strangers, but their women were not secluded, were not wholly uneducated,
and were treated with consideration.

Buddha is regarded as a manifestation of Vishnu--the Hindoos say, to
delude his enemies; the Buddhists, to bring a new revelation. Gautama
was the almost deified being who spread the knowledge of Buddhism, about
500 B.C. In different countries the religion has assumed different
forms, but it is nearly co-extensive with the Mongolian race, and the
general features are the rejection of the Vedas and of most of the Hindoo
myths, faith in the divinity of Buddha, and hope that the individual
personality will be entirely absorbed in his essence, the human being
lost in the Deity. Five laws of virtue must be observed, ten kinds of
sin avoided; and the Buddhist expects that transgressions will be
punished by the transmigration of his soul into some inferior creature,
whence he will rise by successive stages into another trial as a man, and
gradually improving by the help of contemplation, and of a sublime state
of annihilation of all self-consciousness, may become fit for his final
absorption into the Godhead. There is an extensive priesthood, called
Lamas, who live in a state of celibacy in dwellings not at all unlike
monasteries; and, in effect, so much in their practices seems to parody
the ceremonies of Christianity that the Portuguese thought them invented
by the devil for the very purpose. However, there is no doubt that
Buddhism inculcates a much purer morality than the religion of Brahma,
and far higher aims. In Burmah, however, the idea of the eternity of the
Deity had evidently been lost, and Gautama had practically usurped the
place that the higher Buddhists gave to Brahma. Indeed, though the true
Buddhist system looks to the absorption in the Deity,--Nirvana, as it is
called,--the popular notion, as received in Burmah and corrupted by less
refined minds, made it into what was either absolute nonentity or could
not be distinguished from it, so that the ordinary Burman's best hope for
the future was of nothing but annihilation.

There was originally a Burman Empire, but it had become broken up, and
the territories of Ava, Pegu, and Siam were separated, though Ava claimed
them all, and owned a semi-barb