Note 18 — Chapter XIV · THE CITY AND ITS TEMPLES
Reading edition
It is interesting to compare Grueber's account with the journal of Father Rubruquis, who travelled in Mongolia in the thirteenth century. In 1253 he wrote of the Lamas:
'All their priests had their heads shaven quite over, and they are clad in saffron-coloured garments. Being once shaven, they lead an unmarried life from that time forward, and they live a hundred or two of them in one cloister.... They have with them also, whithersoever they go, a certain string, with a hundred or two hundred nutshells thereupon, much like our beads which we carry about with us; and they do always mutter these words, "Om mani pectavi (om mani padme hom)"—"God, Thou knowest," as one of them expounded it to me; and so often do they expect a reward at God's hands as they pronounce these words in remembrance of God.... I made a visit to their idol temple, and found certain priests sitting in the outward portico, and those which I saw seemed, by their shaven beards, as if they had been our countrymen; they wore certain ornaments upon their heads like mitres made of paper.'