1 Ceremonies on the
2 birth of a child.
3 The Diwali festival.
4 Birth of Buddha,
5 G22 Be.
6 His retired and soli-
7 tury habits im his
8 youth.
9 Tis retvetions on
10 th tepe ofeblage,
11 lutruutr ant decath,
12 48 HISTORY OF THE PANJAB.
13 towns and villages. Amulets are worn by women and children as a protec-
14 tion against the evil eye, and a tiger’s claw and a shell fastened to a string
15 and worn on the breast or neck is a sure remedy for counteracting a covetous
16 or evil look. Iron possesses the quality of frustrating the evil eye in a pre-
17 eminent degree, and garlands of siras and mango leaves are also powerful protec-
18 tives when fastened over gateways and arches. Oa the birth of a male child
19 various ceremonies are observed to ensure his long life and immunity from
20 small-pox and evil spirits. Charms are fixed to the wall and fires burnt
21 night and day to prevent the approach of evil spirits. — :
22 Feasts and festivals are, for the most part, rigidly observed. At the
23 Diwali festival there is not a shop or a house that is not cleaned, fresh
24 plastered and lit up with lamps. It is on that night that the souls of
25 ancestors are supposed to visit their living relations, and no pains are spared
26 by the latter to comfort them. The god Krishna, the celebrated cowherd
27 and piper, is worshipped on that night with a variety of ceremonies.
28 CHAPTER VII.
29 —————_—
30 BUDDHISM IN THE PANJAB.
31 wes the original purity and simplicity of the Hindu religion had become
32 debased by the introduction of idolatry; when the worship before
33 rendered to one Supreme Being, the Creator of the Universe, had been
34 extended to terrestrial gods; when the influence of the Brahmins and the
35 caste system were supreme, there arose a reformer, whose object was to
36 emancipate the people from their errors and prejudices and awaken them
37 to a sense of their responsibility and duty to God and man. This was
38 Buddha, the celebrated sage and hermit prince, whose religion has been
39 accepted by nearly half the human race. His original name was Sidhartha,
40 and he was the son of Suddhodana, who reigned over Kapilavastu, the
41 capital of a kingdom of the same name, at the foot of the Nepal
42 mountains. He was born in the year 622 B.c., and belonged to the family
43 of the Sakias. He received his education from Brahmin tutors, but from
44 his boyhood he was given to contemplation, and his father, wishing to
45 draw him to a more active life, married him at the age of sixteen to Gopa,
46 an accomplished princess. Besides her, the prince had two other wives and
47 a number of concubines, with whom he lived a life of luxury and pleasure
48 in his palaces. But he continued to be of a reflective turn of mind, and
49 would say to himself: “Life is like the spark produced by the friction of
50 wood; it is lighted and is extinguished,” and he would discourse of the
51 instability of life and the deliverance of the soul. In this manner he lived
52 till his twenty-ninth year, when one day, while driving out, he saw a decrepit
53 old man, with bald head and trembling limbs, covered with incurable sores,
54 and again a corpse on a bier with the friends of the deceased weeping
55 round it. What profit, he asked himself, could there be in youth, which
56 was subject to so many diseases, to age and to death? Woe to this life of
57 misery and sorrow, a life which is but the sport of a dream and the sound
58 as lyre! Woe to the earth, which is a vale of misery, and to the world,
59 ee full of pain! Sidhartha then resolved to retire from the world,
60 aud, leaving his palace, his wives and children (among whom was a son
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