Travels in the Mogul Empire (Bernier) 6.8.6

6.8.6

We show them deference only for the sake of the deity whom they represent, and when we pray it is not to the statue, but to that deity. Images are admitted in our temples, because we conceive that prayers are offered up with more devotion where there is something before the eyes that fixes the mind; but in fact we acknowledge that God alone is absolute, that He only is the omnipotent Lord.' I have neither added to nor taken from the answer that the Pendets gave me; but I suspect it was so framed as to correspond with the tenets of Christianity. The observations made to me by other learned Pendets were totally different. I then turned the conversation to the subject of chronology, and my company soon showed me a far higher antiquity than ours. They would not say that the world was without a beginning; but the great age they gave it sounded almost as if they had pronounced it eternal. Its duration, said they, is to be reckoned by four Dgugues, or distinct ages; not ages composed, as with us, of an hundred years, but of one hundred lecques, that is to say, of an hundred times one hundred thousand years. I do not recollect exactly the number of years assigned to each Dgugue, but I know that the first, called Sate-Dgugue, continued during a period of five-and-twenty lecques of years ; that the second, called Trita, lasted above twelve lecques; the third, called Duapor, subsisted, if I mistake not, eight lecques and sixty-four thousand years;