["Sensin is a sufficiently faithful transcription of Sien-seng (Sien-shing in Pekingese); the name given by the Mongols in conversation as well as in official documents, to the Tao-sze, in the sense of preceptors, just as Lamas were called by them Bacshi, which corresponds to the Chinese Sien-seng.  M. Polo calls them fasters and ascetics.  It was one of the sects of Taouism.  There was another one which practised cabalistic and other mysteries.  The Tao-sze had two monasteries in Shangtu, one in the eastern, the other in the western part of the town.” (Palladius, 30.) —­H.C.]

One class of the Tao priests or devotees does marry, but another class never does.  Many of them lead a wandering life, and derive a precarious subsistence from the sale of charms and medical nostrums.  They shave the sides of the head, and coil the remaining hair in a tuft on the crown, in the ancient Chinese manner; moreover, says Williams, they “are recognised by their slate-coloured robes.”  On the feast of one of their divinities whose title Williams translates as “High Emperor of the Sombre Heavens,” they assemble before his temple, “and having made a great fire, about 15 or 20 feet in diameter, go over it barefoot, preceded by the priests and bearing the gods in their arms.  They firmly assert that if they possess a sincere mind they will not be injured by the fire; but both priests and people get miserably burnt on these occasions.”  Escayrac de Lauture says that on those days they leap, dance, and whirl round the fire, striking at the devils with a straight Roman-like sword, and sometimes wounding themselves as the priests of Baal and Moloch used to do.

(Astley, IV. 671; Morley in J.  R. A. S. VI. 24; Semedo, 111, 114; De Mailla, IX. 410; J.  As. ser.  V. tom. viii. 138; Schott ueber den Buddhismus etc. 71; Voyage de Khieou in J.  As. ser.  VI. tom. ix. 41; Middle Kingdom, II. 247; Doolittle, 192; Esc. de Lauture, Mem. sur la Chine, Religion, 87, 102; Peler.  Boudd. II. 370, and III. 468.)

Let us now turn to the Bon-po.  Of this form of religion and its sectaries not much is known, for it is now confined to the eastern and least known part of Tibet.  It is, however, believed to be a remnant of the old pre-Buddhistic worship of the powers of nature, though much modified by the Buddhistic worship with which it has so long been in contact.  Mr. Hodgson also pronounces a collection of drawings of Bonpo divinities, which were made for him by a mendicant friar of the sect from the neighbourhood of Tachindu, or Ta-t’sien-lu, to be saturated with Sakta attributes, i.e. with the spirit of the Tantrika worship, a worship which he tersely defines as “a mixture of lust, ferocity, and mummery,” and which he believes to have originated in an incorporation with the Indian religions of the