If time had permitted, by turning aside an hour or two, the ascent of Puk Han might have been varied by a visit to the “Great White Buddha.” This rather interesting relic of a long-time decaying, but possibly now to be revived, Buddhism, I visited one morning in company with Mr. Gillett. The path to it leaves the main road some miles out of the city; where it begins to wind through the paddy fields it becomes somewhat difficult for jinrikishas. On the way one passes shrines such as are used not infrequently for the now forbidden exorcising ceremonies of the sorceresses, and heaps of stones that are continually being piled upon by the passers along the way, who wish thus to propitiate the spirits and to obtain good luck. The Buddha itself is a large and rudely-shaped figure, whitewashed on to the face of a rock, which has been escarped and covered with a pavilion, having a highly decorative frieze and a roof set on granite pillars. A few women were there worshipping in the manner common to the ignorant populace in Korea and Japan—_i. e._, clapping the hands, offering a small coin or two, and mumbling a prayer. A dirty, disreputable-looking priest was assiduously gathering up the coins, for they had merely been placed upon a table before the Buddha, instead of being thrown into an enclosed box. He volunteered the explanation that this was the most celebrated place in all Korea at which to offer effective prayer for a son; childless women, and also men, came from all over the land to worship at this shrine. In Korea, as well as in India and China, this vulgar and degrading superstition is connected with ancestor worship—namely, that the welfare of the living and the dead, in this world and in the next, is somehow inseparably bound up with begetting and bearing, or somehow possessing, a male descendant. No heavier curse is put on woman; no subtler form of temptation to lust for man; no more burdensome restriction on society; and no more efficient check to a spiritual faith and a spiritual development exists among the civilized peoples of the world than this ancient but unworthy superstition. Even devil-worship is scarcely less cruel and socially degrading.