from the world, renounced its seducing pleasures and dazzling vanities, curbed his passions under the yoke of restraint, and strove to practise the highest virtues, particularly self-denial, in order to arrive at a state of complete indifference to all that is within or without self; which is, as it were, the threshold of Neibban. The Talapoin, fixing his regards on that matchless pattern of perfection, would fain reproduce, as far as it lies in his power, all its features in his own person. Like Buddha himself, he parts with his family, relatives, and friends, and seeks for admission into the society of the perfect; he abandons and leaves his home, to enter into the asylum of peace and retirement; he forsakes the riches of this world to practise the strictest poverty; he renounces the pleasures of this world, even the lawful ones, to live according to the rules of the severest abstinence and purest chastity; he exchanges his secular dress for that of the new profession he enters on; he gives up his own will, and fetters his own liberty, to attend, through every act and all the particulars of life, to the regulations of the brotherhood. He is a Talapoin for himself and for his own benefit, to acquire merits which he shares with nobody else. On the occasion of certain offerings or alms being presented to him by some benevolent admirers of his holy mode of life, he will repay his benefactors by repeating to them certain precepts, commands, and points of the law; but he is not bound by his professional character to expound the law to the people. Separated from the world by his dress and his peculiar way of living, he remains a stranger to all that takes place without the walls of his monastery. He is not charged with the care of souls, and therefore never presumes to rebuke any one that trespasses the law, or to censure the conduct of the profligate. The ceremonies of the Buddhistic worship are simple and few. The Talapoin is not considered as a minister whose presence is an essential requisite when they are to be performed. Pagodas are erected, statues of Buddha are inaugurated, offerings of flowers, tapers, and small ornaments are made, particularly on the days of the new and full moon, but on all those solemn occasions the interference of the Phongyie is in no way considered as necessary, so that the whole worship exists independently of him. He is not to be seen on the particular occasions of births and marriages. He is, it is true, occasionally asked to attend funerals; but he then acts, not as a minister performing a ceremony, but as a private person. He is present for the sake of receiving alms that are profusely bestowed upon him by the relatives of the defunct.