Printed in the United States of America New York: R.F. Fenno. 1890. Preface A Journey in Thibet Ladak A Festival in a Gonpa The Life of Saint Issa Resumé Explanatory Notes...

After the Turkish War (1877-1878) I made a series of travels in the Orient. From the little remarkable Balkan peninsula, I went across the Caucasus to Central Asia and Persia, and finally, in 1887, visited India, an admirable country which had attracted me from my earliest childhood. My purpose in this journey was to study and know, at home, the peoples who inhabit India and their customs, the grand and mysterious archæology, and the colossal and majestic nature of their country. Wandering about

During my sojourn in India, I often had occasion to converse with the Buddhists, and the accounts they gave me of Thibet excited my curiosity to such an extent that I resolved to make a journey into that still almost unknown country. For this purpose I set out upon a route crossing Kachmyr (Cashmere), which I had long intended to visit. On the 14th of October, 1887, I entered a railway car crowded with soldiers, and went from Lahore to Raval-Pinidi, where I arrived the next day, near noon. After

Ladak formerly was part of Great Thibet. The powerful invading forces from the north which traversed the country to conquer Kachmyr, and the wars of which Ladak was the theatre, not only reduced it to misery, but eventually subtracted it from the political domination of Lhassa, and made it the prey of one conqueror after another. The Musselmen, who seized Kachmyr and Ladak at a remote epoch, converted by force the poor inhabitants of old Thibet to the faith of Islam. The political existence of L

Leh, the capital of Ladak, is a little town of 5,000 inhabitants, who live in white, two-story houses, upon two or three streets, principally. In its centre is the square of the bazaar, where the merchants of India, China, Turkestan, Kachmyr and Thibet, come to exchange their products for the Thibetan gold. Here the natives provide themselves with cloths for themselves and their monks, and various objects of real necessity. An old uninhabited palace rises upon a hill which dominates the town. Fr

"Best of the Sons of Men." I. 1. The earth trembled and the heavens wept, because of the great crime committed in the land of Israel. 2. For there was tortured and murdered the great and just Issa, in whom was manifest the soul of the Universe; 3. Which had incarnated in a simple mortal, to benefit men and destroy the evil spirit in them; 4. To lead back to peace, love and happiness, man, degraded by his sins, and recall him to the one and indivisible Creator whose mercy is infinite. 5. The merc

In reading the account of the life of Issa (Jesus Christ), one is struck, on the one hand by the resemblance of certain principal passages to accounts in the Old and New Testaments; and, on the other, by the not less remarkable contradictions which occasionally occur between the Buddhistic version and Hebraic and Christian records. To explain this, it is necessary to remember the epochs when the facts were consigned to writing. We have been taught, from our childhood, that the Pentateuch was wri

Chapter III. §§ 3, 4, 5, 7 The histories of all peoples show that when a nation has reached the apogee of its military glory and its wealth, it begins at once to sink more or less rapidly on the declivity of moral degeneration and decay. The Israelites having, among the first, experienced this law of the evolution of nations, the neighboring peoples profited by the decadence of the then effeminate and debauched descendants of Jacob, to despoil them. § 8 The country of Romeles, i.e. , the fatherl