Another great source of enjoyment and instruction is the well-known Buddhist stories, told over and over again, often miraculous, always with a moral. They also reflect on the lives, which they know by heart, of certain great _Bodhisattvas_, or Buddhas in the making, "buds of the lotus," which later on burst into full bloom. One of the pictures in which they delight is that of Gotama[3] when he was a hare and jumped into the fire to feed a hungry Brahmin. Another picture more familiar and more poignant still, depicts his appearance as Prince Vessantara, giving away his wife and beloved children to a hunchback beggar. These stories exert an immense influence. And finally, Buddhism influences Burmese women by appealing to their imagination and their love of mystery, with its solemn chanting, its myriad shrines, with their innumerable candles twinkling in the dusk, and the sexless sanctity of its monks. How wise and good they seem to be! Are they not custodians of the truth? Here one little woman is lifting a heavy stone weighing forty pounds; a monk has told her that if it seems heavy her prayer will surely be answered. To make assurance doubly sure, she may go and consult the soothsayer, whose little booth is near the shrine--a cheerful rogue, not without insight and a sense of humour--but she gives to the monk the supreme place, and pays him more generously! A Burman acquaintance of mine, who was converted to Christianity, was asked by an old lady why he had deserted the "custom" of his people. "I am sick," he began, "of all this bowing down to the monks, and of all these offerings." "Stop, stop!" she cried, aghast. "You are destroying the whole religion of our nation!"