Note 2 — III. LAWS AND CUSTOMS.

They say that a man called Thī-rèng Vàng-rèng (literally, “Dead-alive come-alive”) in former times used to travel between this world and Jòm Rēchō’s abode; he taught them their funeral ceremonies. At last he did not come back. Everything is different in Jòm-āròng. Thīrèng Vàngrèng saw the people there go out to fish, and gather instead pieces of stick. They asked him why he did not gather them too; he answered that they were not fish, but sticks. They waved over them a lighted brand, and he saw them as fish. So, too, there a crab becomes a tiger, or seems to be a tiger. Men do not stay in Jòm Rēchō’s city for ever, but are born again as children, and this goes on indefinitely (here we seem to have a borrowing from Hinduism). “The Mikirs give the names of their dead relations to children born afterwards, and say that the dead have come back; but they believe that the spirit is with Jòm all the same.”2