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numbers 369 millions of believers: that is, far more than any other. These three religions, the most widely diffused of which, Buddhism, subsists without any protection whatever from the State, by its own power alone a circumstance which speaks greatly in its favour, are far from being hostile to one another, and exist quietly side by side, nay, harmonize even to a certain extent, perhaps by reciprocal influence, so that the sentence: "The three doctrines are only one," has become proverbial. The Emperor, as such, professes all three; still many of the Emperors, even up to the most recent times, have been especially devoted to Buddhism. This is shown by their profound respect for the Dalai-Lama, nay, even for the Teschu-Lama, to whom they unhesitatingly yield precedence. These three religions are neither monotheistic nor polytheistic, nor are they even pantheistic, Buddhism, at any rate, is not; since Buddha did not look upon a world sunk in sin and suffering, whose tenants, all subject to death, only subsist for a short time by devouring each other, as a manifestation of God. Moreover the word Pantheism, properly speaking, contains a contradiction; for it denotes a self-destroying conception, and has therefore never been understood otherwise than as a polite term of expression by those who know what seriousness means. It accordingly never entered into the heads of the clever, acute philosophers of the eighteenth century, not to take Spinoza for an Atheist, on account of his having called the world Deus; on the contrary, this discovery was reserved for the sham philosophers of our own times, who know nothing
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