Note 187 — Chapter X

Customs of this kind seem to exist or to have existed all over the world. For Tibet, see Sarat Chandra Das's Journey to Lhasa and Central Tibet, and several recent works. Frazer, in the Golden Bough (2nd edn. vol. iii. pp. 4-6), has an interesting note in which he mentions the same or similar customs in the Solomon and Banks Islands, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Central and South Africa, Bolivia, Burma and Korea. He says: "The act is not a religious rite, for the thing thrown on the heap is not an offering to spiritual powers, and the words which accompany the act are not a prayer. It is nothing but a magical ceremony for getting rid of fatigue, which the simple savage fancies he can embody in a stick, leaf, or stone, and so cast it from him." Gipsies have a custom of leaving heaps of stones and bits of stick at cross-roads, to guide members of their band who have fallen behind. I do not propose to argue from this fact that the gipsy race was originally a Tibetan tribe, in spite of the facts that both gipsies and Tibetans love a wandering life, and that the gipsies of Persia and the Tibetans use almost the same word for "tent," which is guri in Persia and gur (གུར་) in Tibet.