From The Same Word Comes The Burmese P'ungyi Or
Pungi." I May Add That The Chinese Envoy To Cambodia In 1296, Whose
Narrative Remusat Has Translated, Describes A Sect Which He Encountered
There, Apparently Brahminical, As Taosse.
And even if the Bonpo and the
Taosse were not fundamentally identical, it is extremely probable that the
Tibetan and Mongol Buddhists should have applied to them one name and
character.
Each played towards them the same part in Tibet and in China
respectively; both were heretic sects and hated rivals; both made high
pretensions to asceticism and supernatural powers; both, I think we see
reason to believe, affected the dark clothing which Polo assigns to the
Sensin; both, we may add, had "great idols and plenty of them." We have
seen in the account of the Taosse the ground that certain of their
ceremonies afford for the allegation that they "sometimes also worship
fire," whilst the whole account of that rite and of others mentioned by
Duhalde,[13] shows what a powerful element of the old devil-dancing
Shamanism there is in their practice. The French Jesuit, on the other
hand, shows us what a prominent place female divinities occupied in the
Bon-po Pantheon,[14] though we cannot say of either sect that "their idols
are all feminine." A strong symptom of relation between the two religions,
by the way, occurs in M. Durand's account of the Bon Temple. We see there
that Shen-rabs, the great doctor of the sect, occupies a chief and
central place among the idols.
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