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spent a good part of the night at their devotions, which he describes as such "a whooping and shrieking and general caterwauling as should have banished the most belligerent horde of devils as effectually as it did the sound sleep from which it frequently tore me.”40
One could cite dozens of similar passages from the reminiscences of Western travellers and old China hands.*
It may seem remarkable that after a century of such contact, the monks continued to be hospitable and courteous towards foreigners who treated them with even a modicum of respect. But barbarian boorishness was easy to excuse, since it only confirmed the Chinese sense of superiority. Nor was this sense threatened by Christian polemics. The monks were usually able to take care of themselves in an argument. When Timothy Richard interviewed a leading Peking monk, he was asked "Who sent you to China? Your sovereign?" Richard answered: "No, I would not have come to China if I had not felt that God had sent me." The monk said: "How do you know what the will of God is?" Richard's reply is not recorded, but in recounting the conversation he urged that Buddhism should not be judged by the ignorance of the ordinary monk.42
**
What did trouble the Buddhists was their inability to compete with the Christians materially. They did not have the unlimited funds that seemed to be available to missions, so that even if they wanted to, they could not build schools or orphanages on the same scale. Nor did they have the extra-territorial privileges that made it possible for missionaries to offer converts protection from Chinese law. Particularly resented was the fact that the 1929 Regulations for the Supervision of Monasteries and Temples applied to Buddhist and Taoist institutions, but not to Christian ones, which were, of course, exempt by “extrality.”
For all these reasons the Buddhist attitude towards Christianity gradually hardened. Anti-Christian feeling, which had at first arisen in response to Jesuit inroads during the Ming Dynasty,43 began again to displace the usual attitude that all religions were different aspects of a universal truth. It became common (presumably more common than it had been before 1860) for monks to warn their lay disciples against reading Christian books. The lay initiation often included an abjuration of heterodoxy. I have
88
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spent a good part of the night at their devotions, which he describes as such "a whooping and shrieking and general cater- wauling as should have banished the most belligerent horde of devils as effectually as it did the sound sleep from which it frequently tore me.”40
One could cite dozens of similar passages from the remini- scences of Western travellers and old China hands.*
It may seem remarkable that after a century of such contact, the monks continued to be hospitable and courteous towards foreigners who treated them with even a modicum of respect. But barbarian boorishness was easy to excuse, since it only confirmed the Chinese sense of superiority. Nor was this sense threatened by Christian polemics. The monks were usually able to take care of themselves in an argument. When Timothy Richard inter- viewed a leading Peking monk, he was asked "Who sent you to China? Your sovereign?" Richard answered: "No, I would not have come to China if I had not felt that God had sent me. The monk said: "How do you know what the will of God is? Richard's reply is not recorded, but in recounting the conversation he urged that Buddhism should not be judged by the ignorance of the ordinary monk.42
**
What did trouble the Buddhists was their inability to compete with the Christians materially. They did not have the unlimited funds that seemed to be available to missions, so that even if they wanted to, they could not build schools or orphanages on the same scale. Nor did they have the extra-territorial privileges that made it possible for missionaries to offer converts protection from Chinese law. Particularly resented was the fact that the 1929 Regulations for the Supervision of Monasteries and Temples applied to Buddhist and Taoist institutions, but not to Christian ones, which were, of course, exempt by “extrality.”
For all these reasons the Buddhist attitude towards Christianity gradually hardened. Anti-Christian feeling, which had at first arisen in response to Jesuit inroads during the Ming Dynasty,43 began again to displace the usual attitude that all religions were different aspects of a universal truth. It became common (pre- sumably more common than it had been before 1860) for monks to warn their lay disciples against reading Christian books. The lay initiation often included an abjuration of heterodoxy. I have
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