system aim and affect to have no joys or sorrows, hopes or fears, sense or emotion, either of body or mind; living without looking, speaking, hearing, smelling, or feeling; yea, without eating, and without breathing, until they approach to that enviable state of perfection, annihilation. Buddha is nothing, and to escape the various transmigrations, to rise above the happiness of heaven, and to be absorbed into Buddha, is to be amalgamated into nothing. Those who have attained the greatest nearness to this perfect abstraction, are considered the most holy; and if they can manage to sustain life, without appearing to live, they are denominated present Buddhas, and worshipped accordingly. The world-renouncing priest, with vacant stare and emaciated look, not deigning to regard any thing in heaven or on earth, receives divine honours from the wondering by-standers, who think him something more than mortal, because fast approaching to nonentity.
The Buddhist priests, though honoured by their immediate adherents, are treated with the utmost scorn by the literati of China. The indolent lives they lead, and their profession of celibacy, are both odious to the Confucians; not aiding the productiveness of nature, they are looked upon as drones in society, who do nothing towards the improvement of the world, or the benefit of posterity. Hence to be called "a shaven headed priest," is a term of reproach, which a Chinese gentleman would ill brook. These cloistered monks subsist principally by begging, take a vow of poverty, and from their destitute and abject condition, get into habits of sly deceit and cringing meanness, which render them still more the objects of contempt. They seldom cultivate learning, and are content with being
