FORMERLY when Chinese parents had a little baby girl that they did not want, they took it to the nearest river and pitched it in. Of comparatively recent years a Catholic institution called the Holy Childhood Society has been formed for the purpose of rescuing these innocent little ones from death and teaching them to lead good, useful lives. So now the girl babies, instead of being thrown into the rivers as formerly, are carried to this society by the mothers, who get two hundred capeques (about ten cents) for the baby, then turn themselves about without a seeming thought or care of what is to become of the baby. When it is a boy baby that the parents want to get rid of, they sell it to the bonze monks. Occasionally also the ranks of these monks are recruited by receiving children whose parents, for some favor received or desired, have vowed the unborn infant, if it should be a male, to Buddha. It should be consecrated from the hour of its birth. In such a case, when the little fellow is about three years old he is taken to a bonzery and put down in front of a big idol. From that moment he is in the care of the monks, and no possible opportunity is allowed him to escape. Recruits are also got from notable criminals, fleeing from justice, and from indigents who are willing to undergo the fiery initiation for the sake of a lifelong guarantee of boiled rice without much work or worry about getting it.
It is not likely that the earth's surface supports another religious organization that has as many queer, austere, cruel, revolting rites as these same bonze monks of China. Their monasteries are to be found in a number of different places throughout the empire. They are religious monks of Buddha, are called bonzes, and their monasteries are called bonzaries. The Caushan bonzery buildings, which shelter some four hundred of the monks, are situated in a beautiful green nook several leagues from the city of Caushan, which is in the province of Fo-Kien, and are backed by the Foo-Chow Mountains.
A Chinese Farmhouse.
The bonzes are the most illiterate men in China. Very few of them can read, and most of the better class of the Chinese hold them in great contempt. While a certain portion of their number are from time to time detached and sent to the various chapels and pagodas in the neighborhood to care for the devotees, the greater number of them never leave their monasteries from the day of their consecration to death, but serve there their community as shoemakers, carpenters, gardeners.
A supreme torture awaits the poor bonze at the very gates of death. As his hour approaches, whether conscious or unconscious, his fellow-monks lift him up and toss him upon a huge fire, which they have prepared for that purpose. In the tortures of the flames that are built to consume his flesh, he gasps his last breath.—Ruth Everett.
