Last Forbidden Land

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 514, 17 November 1928, Page 25

Last Forbidden Land

(Continued from Page 24). decide among them what is to be done, and the wife agrees; but it is said that in some districts the women have the deciding voice and arrange which Of the husbands is to work with a caravan, which to look after the sheep, which to stay at home on the tiny farm scratched out among the stones, and so on. One thing is at least plain—most of the married women, having more than one husband to complain about, are shrill, bad-tem-pered shrews. The Tibetan custom of polyandry, under which a woman may have several husbands, must have originated

iu harsh, natural conditions, making it necessary to limit the population. The usual custom is for a family of brothers to have one wife between them, the eldest brother being the chief husband. Among the richer Tibetans, however, a man likes to have a wife more or less to himself, and it is not unknown for a man to have several wives. The lamas, nominally, are monks bound to abstain from marriage and all worldly things. Actually, most lamas are grossly immoral and the resulting state of affairs, taken with the promiscuous marriage system, makes the Tibetans oven more immoral. if possible, than the Mongols. Their notions of morality, however, are not nearly so shocking to othe. races and religions as their ideas of death and twrial. To them the soul is everything and the body nothing. When a man dies his soul departs, to enter into a new body—a man. animal, insect or divine being, according to his virtues or sins iu the life just iinished. The corpse is worth neither mourning nor honour. Burial, it is true, is not unknown, but usually the body is thrown out for dogs, vultures or wild animals to devour.