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SINOLOGY. 367
This idea is quite foreign to Buddhism and there is not the
slightest trace of it anywhere in Buddhistic books." We
find the learned sinologist Morrison too l
not less desirous
to discover traces of a God in the Chinese dogmas and
ready to put the most favourable construction upon every
thing which seems to point in that direction; yet he is
finally obliged to own that nothing of the kind can be
clearly discovered. Where he explains the words Thung and
Tsing, i.e. repose and movement, as that on which Chinese
cosmogony is based, he renews this inquiry and concludes
"
it with the words : It is perhaps impossible to acquit
this system of the accusation of Atheism." And even
presents to us a world
recently Upham 2
says : Buddhism "
without a moral ruler, guide or creator." The G-erman
3
in his treatise
sinologist Neumann too, says
mentioned
further on : "In China, where neither Mahometans nor
Christians found a Chinese word to express the theological
conception of the Deity The words God, soul,
spirit, as independent of Matter and ruling it arbitrarily,
are utterly unknown in the Chinese language. . . . This
range of ideas has become so completely one with the lan
guage itself, that the first verse of the book of G-enesis
cannot without considerable circumlocution be translated
into genuine Chinese." It was this very thing that led Sir
George Staunton to publish a book in 1848 entitled :
" An
Inquiry into the proper mode of rendering the word God
in translating the Sacred Scriptures into the Chinese lan
*
guage."
1
Morrison,
"
Chinese Dictionary," Macao, 1815, and following years,
vol. i. p. 217.
8
Upham, "History and Doctrine of Buddhism," London, 1829,
p. 102.
3
Neumann, "Die Natur-und Religions-Philosophic der Chinesen, nacn
den Werken des Tchu-hi," pp. 10, 11.
4 The following account given by an American sea-captain, who had
come to Japan, is very amusing from the naivete with which he assumes