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This idea is quite foreign to Buddhism and there is not the slightest trace of it anywhere in Buddhistic books." We find the learned sinologist Morrison too 1 not less desirous to discover traces of a God in the Chinese dogmas and ready to put the most favourable construction upon every thing which seems to point in that direction; yet he is finally obliged to own that nothing of the kind can be clearly discovered. Where he explains the words Thung and Tsing, i.e. repose and movement, as that on which Chinese cosmogony is based, he renews this inquiry and concludes it with the words' : " It is perhaps impossible to acquit this system of the accusation of Atheism." And even recently Upham 2 says: "Buddhism presents to us a world without a moral ruler, guide or creator." The German sinologist Neumann too, says in his treatise 3 mentioned further on: "In China, where neither Mahometans nor Christians found a Chinese word to express the theological conception of the Deity. The words God, soul, spirit, as independent of Matter and ruling it arbitrarily, are utterly unknown in the Chinese language. . . . This range of ideas has become so completely one with the language itself, that the first verse of the book of Genesis cannot without considerable circumlocution be translated into genuine Chinese." It was this very thing that led Sir George Staunton to publish a book in 1848 entitled: "An Inquiry into the proper mode of rendering the word God in translating the Sacred Scriptures into the Chinese language." 4
1 Morrison, Chinese Dictionary, Macao, 1815, and following years, vol. i. p. 217.
2 Upham, History and Doctrine of Buddhism, London, 1829, p. 102.
3 Neumann, Die Natur-und Religions-Philosophie der Chinesen, nach den Werken des Tchu-hsi, pp. 10, 11.
4 The following account given by an American sea-captain, who had come to Japan, is very amusing from the naïveté with which he assumes
