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16
THREE YEARS IN TIBET

Tibet. To mention a few of these : when an unpleasant rumor had just begun to be circulated, soon after Rai Sarat's departure from Tibet, about his secret mission, the high Lama Sengchen knew at once that death was at his door, but was not afraid. For, when it was hinted at by his friends that he would become involved in a serious predicament, owing to his acquaintance with Rai Sarat, he replied that he had always considered it his heaven-ordained work to try to propagate and to perpetuate Buddhism, not among his own countrymen only, but among the whole human race ; that whether or not Sarat Chandra Das was a man who had entered Tibet with the object of "stealing away Buddhism," or to play the part of a spy, was not his concern — the question had in any case never occurred to him — and that if he were to suffer death for having done what he had regarded it as his duty to do, he could not help it. That this holy Lama was an advocate of active propagandism may be gathered from the fact that, besides sending various Buddhistic images and ritualistic utensils to India, he had caused several persons to go out there as missionaries, my teacher, the Manchurian Lama Serab Gyamtso, in the Ghoompahl Temple of Darjeeling, being one of these. Unfortunately, this undertaking did not prove a success, but none the less it shows the lofty aspirations which actuated the high Lama, who, as I was told, had deeply lamented the decadence, or rather the almost entire disappearance, of Buddhism in the land of its origin, and was sincerely anxious to revive it there. It is nothing uncommon in Japan to meet with Buddhist priests interested in the work or idea of foreign propagandism; but a person so minded is an extreme rarity in that hermit-country Tibet, and that Lama Sengchen was such a one indicates the greatness of his character, and that he was a man above sectarian differences and inter-