Religion 173
initiated ; their names are put in a golden urn, and, in the presence of many abbots and of the Chinese legate, a heaven-directed lottery takes place : the first-drawn name is believed to be that of the child who has received the Kharma of the dead. These incarnations are called Bodisats, a series of individuals ancestrally related to each other in so far as Kharma (general moral influence left by a life) can be said to constitute ancestry. They are in a series which will inevitably end in the production of a true Buddha, an Enlightened One, receiving that fulness of wisdom which came to Gautama meditating under the Bo tree. And this wisdom shall again declare the ways of salvation to a world which shall have forgotten the messages already heard. The dreamers of the faith have imagined Bodisats celestial and terrestrial ; they are here and there in various stages of development ; and the theory of them provides an inexhaustible source of saint-making, yields an angelic hierarchy and multiplies the objects of adoration. The similarity between this evolution and that of angel-and-saint cult in Christian history must strike the most careless observer. The common effects suggest a common source, which cannot well be an exclusive revelation.
The selection of a babe as spiritual head constitutes a most important point of departure from the Roman system, and marks the Tibetan method as distinctly the inferior in respect to obtaining meritorious chiefs. The way is left wide open for cabal and chicanery, such as existed for a time in the Roman Church, permitting children (a Benedict IV., and even a maid, 't is said), to be named as
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