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 percentages of mankind,
and to assign to each system its proportion, are 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 percentage might tell more for
one system than a very large integral one for another.
JAMES LEGGE.
THE TRAVELS OF FA-HIEN
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 Hwuy-king, Tao-ching, Hwuy-ying,
and Hwuy-wei, that they should go to India and seek for the Disciplinary
Rules.
After starting from Ch'ang-gan, they passed through Lung, [3] and came
to the kingdom of K'een-kwei,[4] where they stopped for the summer
retreat.
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