It Does Seem To Me Preposterous To Credit Buddhism With The Whole Of The Vast Population Of China, The Great Majority Of Whom Are Confucianists.

My own opinion is, that its adherents are not so many as those even of Mohammedanism, and that instead

Of being the most numerous of the religions (so called) of the world, it is only entitled to occupy the fifth place, ranking below Christianity, Confucianism, Brahmanism, and Mohammedanism, and followed, some distance off, by Taoism. To make a table of per-centages of mankind, and assign to each system its proportion, is to seem to be wise where we are deplorably ignorant; and, moreover, if our means of information were much better than they are, our figures would merely show the outward adherence. A fractional per-centage might tell more for one system than a very large integral one for another.

THE

TRAVELS OF FA-HIEN

or

RECORD OF BUDDHISTIC KINGDOMS

CHAPTER I

FROM CH'ANG-GAN TO THE SANDY DESERT

Fa-hien had been living in Ch'ang-gan.[1] Deploring the mutilated and imperfect state of the collection of the Books of Discipline, in the second year of the period Hwang-che, being the Ke-hae year of the cycle,[2] he entered into an engagement with Kwuy-king, Tao-ching, Hwuy-ying, and Hwuy-wei,[3] that they should go to India and seek for the Disciplinary Rules.[4]

After starting from Ch'ang-gan, they passed through Lung,[5] and came to the kingdom of K'een-kwei,[6] where they stopped for the summer retreat.[7] When that was over, they went forward to the kingdom of Now-t'an,[8] crossed the mountain of Yang-low, and reached the emporium of Chang-yih.[9] There they found the country so much disturbed that travelling on the roads was impossible for them.

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