Note 5 — Ladak and the Monastery of Hemis.

The only information I here again received was “Ûm mani panee!” The wheel consisted of a roll of the thinnest paper, six inches in diameter, and five and a half in width, closely printed throughout with the eternally recurring words, which all appeared so ready to pronounce and none seemed able to explain. The roll was sixty yards long, and was composed of a succession of strips, one foot nine inches in length, and all joined together. The whole was inclosed in a coarse canvas cover, open at both ends, and marked with what was no doubt the official seal of the particular society for the diffusion of ignorance at Lassa, from which it had originally emanated. Each of the strips contained the mystic sentence, one hundred and seventy times, so that I was thus at once put into possession of all the valuable intelligence to be derived from “Ûm mani panee,” repeated between seventeen and eighteen thousand times. Vide Appendix B. ↑