The difficulty of finding a satisfactory equivalent in Chinese for the word God is well known and has caused much discussion among missionaries. Confucius inherited and handed on a worship of Heaven which inspired some noble sayings and may be admitted to be monotheism. But it was a singularly impersonal monotheism and had little to do with popular religion, being regarded as the prerogative and special cult of the Emperor. The people selected their deities from a numerous pantheon of spirits, falling into many classes among which two stand out clearly, namely, nature spirits and spirits of ancestors. All these deities, as we must call them for want of a better word, present odd features, which have had some influence on Chinese Buddhism. The boundary between the human and the spirit worlds is slight. Deification and euhemerism are equally natural to the Chinese. Not only are worthies of every sort made into gods[558], but foreign deities are explained on the same principle. Thus Yen-lo (Yama), the king of the dead, is said to have been a Chinese official of the sixth century A.D. But there is little mythology. The deities are like the figures on porcelain vases: all know their appearance and some their names, but hardly anyone can give a coherent account of them. A poly-dæmonism of this kind is even more fluid than Hinduism: you may invent any god you like and neglect gods that don't concern you. The habit of mind which produces sects in India, namely the desire to exalt one's own deity above others and make him the All-God, does not exist. No Chinese god inspires such feelings. The deities of medieval and modern China, including the spirits recognized by Chinese Buddhism, are curiously mixed and vague personalities[559]. Nature worship is not absent, but it is nature as seen by the fancy of the alchemist and astrologer. The powers that control nature are also identified with ancient heroes, but they are mostly heroes of the type of St. George and the Dragon of whom history has little to say, and Chinese respect for the public service and official rank takes the queer form of regarding these spirits as celestial functionaries. Thus the gods have a Ministry of Thunder which supervises the weather and a Board of Medicine which looks after sickness and health.