Tibet has always been a subject of curiosity, not more from its inaccessibility than from the singular nature of its government, resting, as is well known, in the hands of a sovereign, elective under a singular and superstitious system, who, by the name of Dalai (_the ocean_) Lama, is not only king and spiritual father, but also the embodied divinity of his people. The Buddhistic faith, numbering as its adherents a greater population than any other existing creed, when driven from its native soil, India, (in which it has long been totally extinct, though its gigantic footsteps still mark the surface in all parts of the peninsula,) spread over Nepaul, Ceylon, the kingdoms of the Transgangetic Peninsula, China, Corea, Japan, Tibet, and the whole Mongolian region to the confines of Siberia. The essential idea of Buddhism appears to be a peculiar development of the notion which runs through nearly all the Asiatic pagan philosophies, and which, interwoven with the fantasies of the innumerable Gnostic sects, once spread its influence to the centre of the Christian world--viz., that all the external world is but a transient manifestation of the Divine Being, and the souls of all living creatures are emanations from Him; that these souls, whilst included in material and perishable bodies, are in a state of imperfection, degradation, and suffering; and that the great object of intelligent creatures should be final release from the clog of the flesh, and abdication of all personal identity, to be absorbed in the universal soul. Considerable difference of opinion exists among the learned as to the true epoch of Sakya Muni or Gautama, the Indian deified saint, or _Buddha_, who was the propagator of the doctrine in the particular form which derives its appellation from him; but the latest of the various periods assigned for his death is 543 B.C. After a long life spent in preaching humility, self-denial, meditation on the divine perfections, and the celebration of solemn ritual services of praise and worship, he is believed himself to have been, at death, absorbed into the divine essence on account of his great attainments in sanctity. Sakya was followed by a succession of sacred personages, who are to be regarded either as mortals whose attainments in sanctity have reached, in repeated transmigrations, to a divine eminence, though not yet to the final absorption of a Buddha, or as voluntary incarnations of souls whose virtue _had_ attained to freedom from the necessity of renewed terrestrial life, but who chose to dwell again on earth in order to aid men in the attainment of perfection, and facilitate their reunion with the universal soul. It is this part of the system which has assumed an exaggerated prominence in Tibet and Mongolia, where these regenerations have gradually, in the general faith, taken the form of continual and manifold incarnations of Buddha, or the Divine Being.