M. Vivien de St. Martin, _Mémoires sur les contrées occidentales_.

Footnote 90:

Oldenberg, _Buddha, etc._, p. 10.

Footnote 91:

_Sacred Books of the East_, vol. i. p. xxii.

Footnote 92:

Tylor, _Primitive Culture_, vol. ii. p. 338; Weber, _Indian

Literature_, p. 38; Sir Monier Williams, _Religious Thought and Life

in India_, p. 18.

Footnote 93:

See Satapatha-Brâhmana, translated by Professor Eggeling in vols. xii.

and xxvi. of _Sacred Books of the East_. Max Müller places the age of

these books within the ninth and seventh centuries B.C.

Footnote 94:

E. Quinet, _Le Génie des Religions_, p. 185; Paris, 1857.

Footnote 95:

Sir Monier Williams, _Religious Thought and Life in India_, p. 24,

referring to the Aitareya-Brahmana, vii. 13.

Footnote 96:

Oldenberg, _Buddha, etc._, p. 15; T. W. Rhys Davids, Hibbert Lectures,

p. 25.

Footnote 97:

Gough, _Philosophy of the Upanishads_, pp. 41, 42.

Footnote 98:

_Sacred Books of the East_, vols. i. and xv. No one has dated any of

the Upanishads earlier than 600 B.C., and some of them are very late.

Footnote 99:

_Sacred Books of the East_, vol. i. p. lxvi.

Footnote 100:

Svetâsvatara-Upanishad, iii. 7, iv. 14, 16, v. 13, vi. 7, 9, _Sacred

Books of the East_, vol. xv.

Footnote 101:

Oldenberg, _Buddha, etc._, pp. 47, 48; Gough, _Phil. Upan._ pp. 61,

67.

Footnote 102:

T. W. Rhys Davids, Hibbert Lectures, p. 28.

Footnote 103:

_History of Israel_, vol. i. pp. 41, 47.

Footnote 104:

Gifford Lectures, _Natural Religion_, p. 563.

Footnote 105:

It is significant that in the beginning of the Bible Nature-worship

seems stamped as accursed in its symbol, the serpent, and that the

whole Bible from beginning to end is a Divine protest against that

worship in all its forms. Mankind in all ages is tempted to become as

the gods, and in a low condition he has almost everywhere succumbed to

the temptation. He feasts his gods, compels them to serve him, is

really higher than they, and thus he degrades himself or falls from

the ideal of one made in the image and after the likeness of God.

Footnote 106:

Ewald, _History of Israel_, vol. i. pp. 320-322.

Footnote 107:

Some ascribe it to the Deuteronomist, ch. vi. 4.

Footnote 108:

Professor Müller finds the first traces of a Maker or Creator in the

Vedic deity Tvashtar, the carpenter—the clever workman, even smith,

forging bolts for Indra therein, Rig-Ved. iii. 55. 19. “Tvashtar, the

enlivener, endowed with many forms, has nourished the creatures and

produced them in many ways; all these worlds are his.” Of another god,

latterly called Pragâpati, he quotes Rig-Ved. x. 81. 2, as one who,

“creating the earth, disclosed the sky by his power.” Very

significantly, however, he reminds us that the same poet loses the

idea, and speaks of the secret of creation as undiscoverable.—Müller’s

_Natural Religion_, p. 245. Also Introd. to Upanishads, _Sacred Books

of the East_, vol. xv. p. xxiv.

Footnote 109:

Fairbairn, _Religion in History and in the Life of To-day_, pp. 39-51.

Footnote 110:

It was only by their very highest and greatest souls that the Godhead

was conceived in anything of its spiritual glory. To Abraham God was

the Creator, distinct from and greater than the earth and heavens

which He had made; to Moses He was a righteous Lawgiver, training upon

eagle-wings a peculiar people; to David He was a tender and wise

Shepherd of a foolish and helpless flock; to Isaiah and the later

prophets a Father dealing with rebellious people, whom He pities,

knowing whereof they were made. These conceptions, however, cannot be

said to have been those of the mass of the people.

Footnote 111:

Kuenen, _National Religions and Universal Religion_, Hibbert Lectures,

1882, p. 187.

Footnote 112:

Edersheim, _Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah_, vol. i. p. 275.

Footnote 113:

Jos. _Contra Ap._ ii. 30. 32; _Antiq._ xviii. 1. 1; _Jewish Wars_, ii.

8.

Footnote 114:

Uhlhorn, _Conflict of Christianity_, chaps. i. ii.; Jos. _Antiq._

xiii. 9. 1, and 11. 3, and _Contra Ap._ ii. 10. 39; Kuenen, _Religion

of Israel_, iii. 273 _seq._; Renan, _Les Apôtres_, pp. 253, 260.

Footnote 115:

The truth on which the Sabbath is founded is the majestic truth of a

completed creation, and one conform to the latest discoveries of

science. During the whole course of human observation no new creative

effort has been displayed in the production of a new type. The animal

and vegetable worlds stand to-day as man first beheld them. The

creative spirit has passed into the soul of man, in whose world is the

progress which nature has long ceased to manifest, and under whose

handling nature itself improves. But God, though resting from His

works of creation, is not in Scripture said to be resting from His

works of mercy: “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.”

Footnote 116:

“The words of Agur the son of Jakeh,” Proverbs xxxi. 1.

Footnote 117:

Hüber, _Der Pessimismus_, 1876, p. 8; Holdheim, Preface to vol. iii.

of _Predigten_, quoted by Cheyne, _Job and Solomon_, pp. 250-253.

Footnote 118:

Eccles. xii. 12.

Footnote 119:

Edersheim, _Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah_, vol. i. p. 276;

Keim, _Jesus of Nazara_, vol. i. pp. 316-325; Kuenen, _Religion of

Israel_, vol. iii. p. 177.

LECTURE III.

THE BUDDHA OF THE PITAKAS: THE CHRIST OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.

The condition of Palestine and the progress of events in it at the

beginning of the Christian era, are set in the clear light of history,

and defined by an accurate chronology. To the superficial observer it

appeared to be a prosperous land, for it was fertile and carefully

tilled, populous, and, in the northern regions especially, teeming with

the fruits of industry. It had reached the commercial stage of

civilisation, and everywhere, in well-built cities adorned with palatial

buildings, many of them the abodes of merchants who rivalled the Italian

nobles and Herodian princes in the costliness of their manner of living,

it yielded indications of the luxury which successful commerce brings in

its train. But as always happens when wealth abounds in a land, there

was a corresponding amount of poverty. While the rich were lavishing

fortunes upon selfish and gigantic follies, an increasing multitude,

born and bred in squalor, were struggling for very existence. In the

days of the Son of Man their numbers were vastly increased by political

troubles which disturbed trade and depressed agriculture. So to an eye

that looked beneath the surface this seemingly prosperous Palestine was

diseased and in a dangerous condition, for pauperism and discontent were

rapidly maturing the seeds of anarchy, and preparing for the successive

revolutions in which so many perished before the Roman eagles swept down

upon the carcass of a State politically dead, because morally and

socially corrupt.

Under the Herodian dominion, secured as it had been by the destruction

of an illustrious royal house and the sacrifice of their bravest

patriots, the sympathies of the people revolted from the throne to

cluster for a time around the temple; but just as the dignity of the

office of the high priest was rising in their estimation, successive

nominations to it by the king and procurator of men odious to the good

turned the tide in a different direction. The hierarchy was represented

by the Sadducees, a party small in number and far from popular. Though

wearing names of ancient and honoured families, they were obviously

careless alike of the sanctuary and of the interests of the nation.

Strict observers of the law of their Davidic ancestor, they rejected the

prevalent interpretations of it, and all the new-fangled doctrines

concerning angels and spirits, and the resurrection of the just, which

had been formulated since the Exile. Especially opposed to the belief

that the keeping of the law would procure for a man recompence in a

future state, they held that the law must be kept to the letter just

because it was God’s will, even though the soul died with the body.

Their wealth and position as the aristocracy brought them into

connection with the representatives of the great foreign powers of the

times, whose manners and fashions they copied; but the nearer they drew

to the Roman and Asmonean nobility the further they drew apart from the

people whom they never pretended to love, and who, equally alienated,

regarded them with similar dislike.

Withdrawn from the temple, the affections of people were freely given to

the synagogue leaders as the representatives and fosterers of the

national ideals and hopes. In these days every small town had its

synagogue, while in Jerusalem alone there were said to be four hundred

and eighty. These were not only places of worship, but schools in which

the Law was made the common possession of all without distinction, and

also arenas for exciting discussion, in which was nursed that love of

dialectics to which so many striking analogies exist both in India and

Greece. They were dominated by the Scribes, the sole copiers for the

ever increasing synagogues of the ancient Scriptures, and the true

interpreters of the law. Pedantic and self-important though they

generally were, they were revered so by the people for their piety and

gifts that from them were chiefly selected the members of the court of

the Sanhedrim, which represented all that was left to the nation of

executive power. Their Cabbala, revealing the secret doctrines to be

found in names, of which we have specimens in the writings of St.

Paul,[120] and the mystic significance of numbers, of which we have

traces in the Apocalypse, may be only interesting now as curiosities,

but we must never forget that they rendered undying service to the world

in preserving from corruption, by many arts carefully studied and

applied, the texts of Holy Scripture.[121]

The Pharisees, the Nazarites of the nation as their name implies, the

democratic antagonists of the aristocratic Sadducees, the staunch

opponents of the Gentile, the believers in the coming kingdom of the

just, were deservedly the most popular of all the religious sects in

Palestine. More liberal than the Sadducees in their interpretation of

the law in its bearing upon the people, they never thought of exacting

for faults or transgressions the ancient penalties; but they were far

more severe in their personal observance of it.[122] To the mass of them

it was a ladder by which they might climb into the kingdom of heaven;

and out of it, to make sure of this end, they evolved a most

comprehensive system of bye-laws, as sacred to them as the original

precepts by which every action and word and relation of life was

regulated. Pharisaism was just Brahmanism, and though more ethically

applied it was in its spirit and aim as selfish. Bent only upon

accumulating merit, in character it became eventually as morally impure.

Forgetting in their attention to petty details the weightier obligations

of life, disregarding their neighbours that they might provide for their

own recompence, the Pharisees became as a class so corrupt as to draw

upon them the most scathing of all the denunciations of our Lord.

More Pharisaic than the Pharisees, said to be an offshoot or secession

from them, the Essenes in their desert communities sought by the worship

of Jehovah in the spirit of the prophets, and yet apparently by prayers

to the sun, and by an ascetic and celibate life, to deliver the immortal

soul from material impurity, to educate it to enjoy the beatific vision,

and to prophesy the secret things of the future. In these communities of

pious people, the very flower of Judaism,[123] the only ray of light in

the deepening darkness, some may be pardoned in professing to find the

dawn of Christianity—not in its external arrangements, but its inward

dispositions and beliefs. In its avowal that morality was superior to

legal observance, in its endeavour to prepare the mind by calm to

receive the Divine instruction, in its sabbatic sanctification of all

days of the week, in its estimate of all work as religious, and of every

meal as sacramental, it pre-intimated the teaching of the coming gospel;

but while its arrangements may have suggested the monastic institutions

of Christendom, we can never regard it as the matrix of Christianity.

Its life was just the last flickering ray of Judaism, a bright gleam

irradiating the features of a moribund age, but not that of a new birth

with promise of a mighty future. It was not the rush of a new force into

the battle of the redemption of humanity, but the _sauve qui peut_ of a

rout which it believed to be universal. As pessimist as Brahmanism in

its views of life, though more Buddhist than Brahman in its methods, its

aim was the same—that of rescuing the individual from a world nigh unto

perdition and really not worth the saving.[124]

In the virtuous Pharisee and the pious Essene Judaism found its best

representatives;[125] but at most there were only six thousand

Pharisees[126] and four thousand Essenes[127] in all the nation, and,

alas! the majority of the Pharisees were not sincere; and the Essenes,

though really in earnest, had abandoned the nation to its fate. Among

the religious classes piety and morality had become so dissociated that

a man who in the matter of belief or of worship would strain at a gnat,

might in practice without condemnation swallow a camel. The result of

this fatal divorce between creed and conduct was seen in a social

corruption which augured everywhere the gathering of the storm-clouds of

retribution. At that time Greece was dead, and what was best in its

spirit had passed into Alexandria. There, blending with the more robust

spirit of the Hebrew religion, it was forming that Hellenism which,

though it never could account for the origin, was yet powerfully to

influence the unfolding of our religion. In Hellenism we have the

natural resultant of the conflux of Eastern and Western thought, which,

according to some, will explain the birth of Christianity. In it

certainly the Aryan and the Semite were seen contributing their very

best thoughts, and the product was—Philo; but Philo-Judæus is neither

St. Paul nor St. John, and the Christ of the Gospels is further beyond

him than the heavens are above the earth.

In Alexandria Greece might be said to live, but Rome was hopelessly

dying. Drunk with the cup of the sorceries of all nations, embruted with

every lust, it was staggering to a doom which neither law, even the best

conceived and most thoroughly administered, nor philosophy, even the

wisest and most consistently illustrated, could avert. The civilisation

of the Western world was marvellous: it was a world not only of poets

and artists, of brave soldiers and subtle statesmen, but of sound

moralists too; but civilisation, powerless to save, could only cover

with broidered robes the leprous body, or adorn with golden trappings

its bier, and morality could not restore what was sick unto death. When

Rome and Palestine were alike corrupt, there was no hope for the world

in man; yet when all help in man faileth, there never lacketh help in

God, and so, just when the night was blackest, and despair had seized on

all save a few aged people in the courts of Zion, and a few thoughtful

Magi in the distant East, lo! over a Babe in the cattle-crib of a leewan

in Bethlehem was descried the shining of the Star of Hope.

When we turn from Palestine to the holy land of Magadha, the cradle of

Buddhism in the sixth century B.C., we find no light of history

streaming upon it. All is dim and shadowy, with no chronology to define

events, and no incidents to distinguish personalities. It is like a land

of dreams to our modern conception, but it is not a chaos. We can trace

to a certain extent movements in it, and as we follow them there emerges

in outline sufficiently clear a real civilisation, which, though lacking

the stir and endeavour, the commerce and the art of the West, and really

inferior to it, is yet most interesting in its pathetic resemblances,

and all the more instructive that its beliefs and institutions were

formed out of antecedents and predispositions very different from any of

which the Western world had experience.

It is evident from the very cursory survey already made that religious

belief in India and in the West must have passed through phases

significantly similar. In both it proceeded from faith in a revealed

system of truth—in India in the inspired Vedas, in Palestine in the

inspired oracles. Human speculation in both cases was begotten, and for

long it was educated in faith in revelation, then beginning to

rationalise; in both cases it unintentionally undermined what at first

it only endeavoured to explain. Turning from ancient scrolls to the

study of the book of human nature, whose pages, though often tattered

and defiled, are always fascinating, it was staggered by the

contradiction between man’s ideals of goodness and justice and the

realities of human history. Out of this collision arose the Promethean

demand that the divine powers that govern life “should either explain or

abdicate.” In Palestine this wrestle with the inequalities of providence

originated early, and continued all along; but it was confined within

limits by faith in the personality of Deity as one so infinitely greater

than man that only a part of His ways could be understood. Indian

speculation never reached the approaches to this idea of God: it

wandered into a Pantheism of a grosser type than ever the West was

acquainted with, and once it reached that stage it could not stop. Just

as in Greece pantheism ripened into the materialism of the Epicurean and

the atheism of the Stoic, so in India, even before the days of Gotama,

may have begun that open revolt against Deity, in the perilous attempt

of reason to explain by itself the universe, with which his name has

since then been most closely associated.

The religious world in India in the times preceding his birth, like the

religious world of Palestine, had a hierarchy represented by the

Brahmans, the indispensable functionaries in all sacrificial services.

Corresponding to the Scribes were the Teviggi, the reciters and

expounders of the sacred and still unwritten books. The Rabbin had their

analogies in reforming Brahmans, who alone or in communities that had

gathered round them professed to teach the higher discipline which could

secure deliverance. If a multitude of sects be an indication of

intellectual movement, there was as much stir in Brahmanism as in

Judaism. In the Pali books there are mentioned as contemporaries of

Buddha six noted teachers of great schools, the most formidable of whom,

or at least the most hated of his soul, was the head of an ascetic sect

which, like the Essenes, had renounced the world to make good their own

salvation. This Niggantha sect, still represented in India by close upon

half a million of adherents in the district of Rajputana, claims not

only to have preceded the founder of Buddhism by two hundred and fifty

years, but to have anticipated the essentials of his system.[128] Its

philosophical and ethical doctrines are almost in accord with his, while

its cosmogony and ritual incline more towards those of Hinduism. Its

adherents apply to their founder the titles “Victor” or Jina, and

“Enlightened One” or Buddha, which many imagine were ascribed solely to

Gotama; but whether Buddhism sprang from it or gave birth to Jainism is

a question still undecided. The only solid fact as yet ascertained is

that from the earliest traceable period their mutual relations are

marked by that pronounced intolerance[129] which prevails when kinsfolk

quarrel.

Collision and antagonism between sects in India was neither so sharp nor

so fierce as in Palestine, and Buddha ministered in conditions much more

favourable to the propagation of his system than did Jesus Christ. The

Sadducean opponents of Christ represented a powerful hierarchy, the

Pharisees a popular democracy, and the Scribes an influential Sanhedrim,

with power of inflicting a sentence of death. The Essenes never mingle

in the scenes of the Gospel, and it is questionable if they are ever

referred to in them. Over all and dominating all was a most jealous and

vigilant Roman despotism, ever ready to turn even a religious quarrel to

its own account, so that it was the most natural of things that an

opposition thus represented should nip, as it were, Christianity in the

very bud by crucifying its Founder. In Magadha, however, it was

otherwise. The broad distinction was between Brahmans and Sramans,[130]

the latter a general title covering many secessions from Brahmanism, and

the popular favour was equally bestowed on both. The Brahmans, though

dominant, had not the power, and to their credit do not seem to have had

the will, to persecute. It was not from them, but from the scholastic

and conceited Teviggi and from the ascetic sects that Buddha encountered

most formidable opposition; and yet even in these cases opposition was

not rigid. It was a war not of blows, but of words, in which an appeal

to the secular arm or to force was out of the question. A new sect,

therefore, especially one that had donned the yellow robes and alms-bowl

of the mendicant, protesting against the debasing belief in the efficacy

of Brahmanic rites, or the virtue gained by extravagant Yogi

austerities, would obtain from the people at large more favour than

resistance or disdain.

The intellectual movement in India appears thus to have been extensive

and many-sided. In the multitude of sects there is a guarantee for

freedom,[131] and competition in the proclamation of truth is better

than monopoly; but in religion, as in trade, the competition of

over-multiplying sects tends to increase adulteration. So in early

Buddhist literature, while there is incontestable evidence of the

existence of honest instructors, there is also unquestionable evidence

of the abundance of quacks, who trifled with truth simply to make a gain

of it, and of shallow but clever professionals, who dealt with gravest

themes in the spirit of the mere debater.[132] So there, as in Palestine

in the days of Coheleth, through over-discussion the old faith was

rapidly evaporating. In the Brahmans, religion had degenerated into

formalism; in the Teviggi, into traditionalism. In the philosophic

Sramans it was in many instances passing into blank atheism; and among

the ascetics, into despair. While this was the condition of the learned

and of the few, the masses everywhere, like the Ammé Ha-árets in

Palestine, were wandering—no man caring for them—further and further

into the idolatries and sensualities of Hinduism. Morality was

perishing, the writing on the heart was getting more indistinct, and

conscience becoming more confused. Then, just as five centuries later,

when faith was almost gone, Christ came to restore it by communicating

new life, so when divine law was in danger of fading from the

consciousness of men, there arose one to assert its eternal supremacy;

preaching the creed of Coheleth without his fear of God, and enforcing

the keeping of the commandments, not as expressed in Vedas or

interpreted in Brahmanas, but as written in every fibre of the body and

every faculty of the being, as the only way to safety.

Who was he? Like the Author of Christianity, he has had to contend, as

it were, for the recognition of his personal existence. Even to-day it

is maintained that neither Christ nor Buddha ever existed, that they

were merely incarnations of popular conceptions, and that all the

legends concerning them can be reduced to a combination of anterior

mythological elements. These mythical theories, however, in regard to

the origin of Christianity, may be considered among the curiosities of

criticism;[133] and in regard to the origin of Buddhism, though more

justified by the confessed uncertainty as to dates, they have been

satisfactorily dispelled as another instance of refining overdone.[134]

Brahmanism and the successive phases of Hinduism can be traced to no

individual founder, but in investigating the origin of Buddhism we

breathe a very different atmosphere. There is a human and moral

character about it which the other Indian religions lack: something real

as in Mosaism, and palpable as in Islam.[135] We may rest assured that

Buddhism had for its founder a real person, and though our best

authorities have had to search for their facts through a vast amount of

fabulous materials, we may accept the dates which they have

approximately fixed for his birth and death, and the outlines which they

have sketched of his life and ministry.

Gotama, a name still found among the Rajput chiefs of Nagara, was born

in the north-eastern region of India, about a hundred miles from

Benares, about the year B.C. 557. His father, a Sakya, a name unknown in

any native Indian family, and said to indicate descent from a race of

northern nomad immigrants, was rajah of Kapila, and his mother was a

daughter of the family of Koli.[136] His principalities, of very limited

extent, seem to have been eventually swallowed up by the greater Indian

monarchies, for when Fa-Hian visited the country Kapila had become a

vast solitude, and there for ages its very name has perished from the

living speech of men. Even though his royal pedigree be an embellishment

of the later legends, there seems no reason to doubt that his father was

noble and rich according to the standard of the time, and sufficiently

independent of Brahman domination to train his son in his own way. It

seems not to have been in their studies, but in the exercises befitting

a warrior prince, that Gotama was educated, though a disposition

thoughtful and melancholy, and strongly sympathetic, appears to have

disinclined him from such a mode of life. Even as a youth the darker

sides of existence threw a shadow over him; the sufferings of mankind

were among his earliest impressions, and he brooded over them till his

mind, poisoned by the contemplation of them, threw its gloom over

everything around him, and made the very air hang heavy with the weight

of woe.

To one driven as he was to the conclusion that existence was a burden

rather than a blessing, death, according to the belief in which he had

been nurtured, could afford no relief; but hope seemed to dawn for him

as he thought of the happy yellow-robed sages who, freed from his

horror, were tranquil and dignified, abstracted alike from pleasure and

pain. So after a period of irresolution and struggle, in the very prime

of his manhood, he stole away from his wife and his new-born child, and

cast in his lot with the forest recluses. Having lived some time with

them, and having found that their ascetic discipline failed to satisfy

his aspirations, he left them, and joined two philosophic Brahmans, who

taught him the science of meditation in its lower and higher degrees.

Though he had profited so much by their instruction and discipline that

he rose in six years from being a disciple to a teacher, he confessed

that he had not found by their methods the imperishable and permanent

quietude which he coveted. So, abandoning all his disciples, he withdrew

into solitude, and plunged into fasting so rigorous that he nearly

destroyed himself; then, finding that the secret of deliverance was not

thus to be obtained, he returned, amid the contempt of his former

companions, to a more genial mode of life. Then, all alone in the

jungle, its manifold discomforts, the memories of home, and the

fruitlessness of all his endeavours, assailed him with the force of a

temptation to desist from the quest; but rallying all his powers for one

supreme effort, he eventually, under a banyan-tree at Bohimanda,

triumphed—awoke as one before whom all illusion had vanished, and who by

no divine illumination, but by his own personal energy, had attained to

knowledge of the causes of all things, and had at last become the

Buddha, the Enlightened One.

We need have no difficulty in accepting this outline of the man’s

spiritual history as substantially correct; and assuming it to be so, we

see at once that it is contrasted in every point with the early history

of Jesus of Nazareth. In the Indian narrative, _e.g._, we have long and

prolix details of the youth and manhood of Gotama; in the Christian

Gospels very few incidents, one pregnant saying, two or three words of

description, sum up the whole record of Christ’s biography till He

appeared before the Baptist. This silence is surely suggestive, for it

could not have been the result of ignorance or forgetfulness. “It is

silence, where, to a moral certainty,” as is indicated alike by the

apocryphal Gospels and the Buddhist legends, “men left to themselves

would have used much speech.” In the Gospels the things which we are

naturally curious to know are concealed from us, and there is disclosed

only the spiritual reality in which Christianity consists. Where He was,

how He looked, what He did during these long years of waiting and

preparation, the Evangelists have not told us; but they have revealed

enough to show what He was. Scenery and circumstances are as nothing,

because the life that was revealing itself in them was everything; and

of the unfolding of that life, the few and slight but most suggestive

touches of the Gospels enable us to form clearer conceptions than we are

ever likely to form of Gotama’s from the abundant incidents of the

Buddhist story.

Thus while the son of the Indian rajah did not require to keep from

himself anything that his heart desired, Jesus of Nazareth in the home

of Galilee had to deny Himself, and to endure in the commonest kind of

labour a hardness which the Indian youth, in the inertion of his class

and race, regarded as part of the curse of existence. Still, Jesus had

meat to eat which the other knew not of; He had bread enough and to

spare, while the other was perishing of hunger. Rich in poverty, while

Gotama was poor in his abundance, Jesus the carpenter appears highly

exalted in what the other would have called humiliation. There, while

Gotama, having everything which he could desire at his call, had

discovered that human life was worse than vanity, Jesus,

self-surrendered in faithful service of others, was learning how full of

blessedness and how rich in power of blessing the life of any man might

be. The angels of nature and providence, by the lilies of the field and

the children in the market-place, instructed him in a wisdom which no

Indian sage ever dreamed of; and though He saw the wretchedness of this

evil world as Gotama never saw it, and felt for the misery of men as

Gotama never could feel, He saw what even Buddha the Enlightened never

could descry, the face of a Father in Heaven not frowning in wrath but

yearning in pity over all. So, instead of repelling, the suffering and

evil of the world drew Jesus closer to it, till, finding His grace, not

as Gotama found His wisdom, in desire to be delivered from it, but in

the depth of His longing to save it, He gave Himself to it and for it,

as for a joy that was set before Him.

Again, the enlightenment of Gotama was the result of a painful struggle,

first between inclination and duty, and then with great perplexities of

duty, but in Christ it was painless and natural, like the growing of the

dawn into the day. His pure and at first joyous life unfolded itself

like a beautiful morning under the animating impulse of love to God and

to all His creatures. As He grew in consciousness of the heaven within,

He became more conscious of the disorder without, and more sensible of

His isolation in regard to it. As year by year the sense not of the

world’s misery but of its guilt increased within Him, there would also

increase the longing that it should be taken away. Very early the

conviction took possession of Him, that He was not here to win His own

way to deliverance, but to be about His Father’s business. Gradually the

Father’s business was revealed to Him, and when the preaching of the

Baptist had made it clear, without any wrestle like Gotama’s, Christ,

ever close to His Father, and ever clear in His duty, set Himself at

once to fulfil it.

It is often alleged that the temptation in the wilderness, which marked

the close of our Lord’s long period of silent preparation, is an exact

parallel to the fasting and temptation which preceded Gotama’s

enlightenment at Bohimanda. There is doubtless an external similarity

sufficient to arrest our attention, but the internal contrasts disclose

experiences of quite different characters. In the light of their

respective histories, these occurrences, though often referred to as

miraculous, were in reality most natural. They represent experiences of

which there could be no witnesses, and which, indescribable in plain

words, could only be suggested by a kind of parable. The temptations are

recorded not as they were presented to the persons tried, but in the

character which they assumed when their drift was discovered and their

aim was detected. Both were assailed by suggestions, raising in them a

tumult of emotion, which, if unresisted or yielded to, would in Gotama’s

case have been equivalent to abandonment of his quest for deliverance

for the sake of sensual indulgence offered by Mâra and his daughters,

and in the case of Christ, to refusal to live by obedience, to tempting

the Holy One of Israel, and to worshipping the splendid majesty of

wrong. The temptations were real, assailing the will, seeking to

paralyse or to change it; and their force in each case would be in

proportion to the depth and purity of the natures assailed. Gotama,

though unmistakably a man of high spiritual aspiration, was attacked by

sensual visions,[137] which could not possibly have been a temptation to

a nature like Christ’s. He had “to repel as evil what to other men would

have appeared as ideals of good, and had to turn away from what the

noblest of men would have cherished as innocent dreams or splendid

chances,”[138] because to His pure eyes they were Satanic temptations.

He suffered, being tempted, but His trouble and suffering were caused

neither by irresolution, nor vanity, nor fear, but by His own lowly

humility and to the sense of the exceeding greatness of His mission.

Gotama, sorely concerned about himself, went apart to fast and meditate

and wrestle for his own deliverance, but Christ went apart not to

fast—fasting was an unheeded incident in and not the aim of His

retirement, and in no perplexity about His own salvation, for that was

assured and made the basis of assault,—but that in quiet meditation He

might see more clearly the way by which the salvation of God could be

brought to mankind. Christ was forced to acknowledge that absolute

surrender to His Father’s will in His mission meant absolute antagonism

to the world, and He was tried by suggestions as to the mode of

prosecuting His mission, all the more seductive that they were confessed

to be natural. Might He not, as the Beloved of Heaven, to carry the

world along with Him, and to save multitudes from suffering, swerve just

a little from His high ideal, and accommodate His ways to suit their

prejudices? These temptations in the beginning continued His temptations

to the very close of His ministry. Not once, but all His life, as He

hungered for the sympathy and trust of those whom He sought to save, was

He tempted, as in Capernaum, when many fell away from Him, to “change

the stones into bread.” Not once only did He stand on “the battlements

of the temple,” nor once only was He offered “all the kingdoms of the

world and the glory of them.” Again and again was He in peril when He

stood high in the opinion of the crowds, and heard them in their Hosanna

entreating Him, through His very sympathy with and love for them, to

gratify their wishes; yet in every case the temptation was rejected

without the slightest wavering the moment it was understood. “Get thee

behind me, Satan.” “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.” “The cup

which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?”

For again, Christ conquered because from the beginning to the closing

agony He stood firm rooted in obedience and in submission to the will of

a Higher than self; but the Buddhist writers want to impress the very

opposite of this upon us in regard to Gotama’s victory. He is said to

have conquered Mâra by the force of his own will, and won his way to

light by his individual energy alone. After he became Buddha he

hesitated whether he would preach the way of deliverance to men, not

because, like Moses and the Hebrew prophets, he had no confidence in

himself and required the assurance of a divine strength not his own. He

had perfect assurance in himself, but he had no confidence at first in

the ability of others to comprehend and to follow him in a way so

difficult to find and so hard to tread.[139] He asked no deity to help

him, for he was greater and wiser than all the gods. In the legends

Brahma is said in intercession to have pressed him to preach the way,

and moved eventually by no intercession, but simply by his own pity for

men lost in the vortices of miserable existence, he went forth in no

strength but his own to preach and to teach in a ministry, not of shame

and humiliation and death, but one of great exaltation and honour.

This conception colours the narrative of his whole career. In the later

scriptures he is designated the Tathâgata (He who has gone or arrived at

Nirvana), the very reverse and point-blank contradiction of Christ the

Messiah, He who was sent. There was no higher to send him, no wiser to

teach. He came in his own name; but Jesus, as one sent by Him into the

world, went forth in the name of His Father. Though He made demands upon

the faith of the world compared with which the pretensions of Gotama are

trivial—for at the highest he only claimed to be Buddha the Enlightened,

while Christ spake of Himself as the “Light of the world,”—yet in

Christ’s claim there was ever a sense of dependence expressed or

implied, as of one who of His own self could do nothing, and who only

taught what His Father had showed Him. Both spake with authority, and

not as the scribes; both superseded the traditional domination of what

was said by men of old times with the emphatic “I say unto you”; but

there is a vast difference in the quality of this authority in the two

cases. The authority of Buddha sprang from his acknowledged intellectual

superiority, but the authority of Jesus sprang from spiritual insight.

The deliverances of Buddha were given after the manner of a Socratic

dialogue, and he won his converts and vanquished opponents by his

dialectic skill.[140] But in all the encounters of Christ with His

enemies there was no forcing of their reason to gain His end. His

replies and counter questions were brief and direct and incisive; they

were like the fiat of a king or the sentence of an unchallengeable

judge, from which reason and conscience alike confessed that there could

be no appeal.

Certainly in the two ministries was fulfilled a saying of Christ, “I am

come in my Father’s name, and ye receive me not; if another shall come

in his own name, him will ye receive,” for after a very short period of

imperfect success the public career of Gotama became a continuous

victorious progress. Disciples, drawn mostly from the highest

classes—the Brahmans, the nobles, and the wealthy merchants—flocked

round him wherever he appeared. He journeyed followed by admiring

crowds, he had only to show himself to impress, and he had only to

preach to convince. The most stubborn resistance became fluid under his

spell, and those who approached to confute were sure to succumb to his

sweet reasonableness. He was supported by powerful rajahs, and those who

did not show him proper reverence were punished according to their

edicts. He was lodged in parks and gardens and palaces, several of which

were gifted to him for the use of his Order. Accessible always to people

of all castes, and of every condition, and of both sexes, he received

the attention of the courtesan, and shared her feast and accepted her

offering,[141] but he always maintained the nobility and purity of an

irreproachable character, and wherever he was found it was as the

prophet of righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come. Rejoicing

through his long and honourable ministry, sometimes loath to die, as

foreseeing the troubles which would befall his Order after his decease,

he at last, when over fourscore years, in a sickness alleged to have

been induced by partaking too freely of some rich food, with the quiet

dignity and composure of a saint, fell asleep, and was buried with the

funeral obsequies which Indians then bestowed on the bodies of their

greatest kings.[142]

It would be impossible, in every respect, to find a more absolute

contrast to all this than the story of Jesus of Nazareth. If He was

popular, it was only for a little, and then only with the masses. The

aristocracy and the religious classes stood aloof, and soon entered into

a conspiracy to get rid of Him. He had a few disciples among them, like

Joseph of Arimathæa, and Nicodemus, and the family at Bethany, but the

words of the prophet accurately sum up the narratives of the Gospel,

that He was “despised and rejected of men.” To follow Him meant joining

in no triumphal procession, but in a struggle against storm and tide

which was sure to end in death. Suspected from the first, and speedily

denounced, He was watched and tracked and driven from place to place,

till at last the toils of the hunters closed successfully around Him,

and at the age of thirty-three He was crucified as a malefactor between

two robbers on Calvary.

But the grand and crowning distinction between the import and effect of

the two ministries emerged at the close. After Gotama died and his body

was burned, and his relics had been reverently gathered, and

distributed, and enshrined in costly dagobas erected in the various

scenes of his labours, there was an end of him. He had gone out into the

void, according to his own theory of the hereafter, and, no longer

capable of being of use to his disciples, he exhorted them to be “their

own refuge, their own law, and to work diligently out their

salvation.”[143] But when Jesus had been crucified there was manifestly

not an end, but rather a new beginning of His personal influence, a

rising in fuller power, a coming again with greater authority. From the

very morning of His ministry He took His death into His plan, as the

consummation of one stage of His mission, without which His plan would

have been a failure. All His teaching centred in His death, as a moral

and spiritual necessity in Divine providence. Instead of complaining of

it, He pointed to it as the seal of His Messiahship, “the cause for

which He was born, the end for which He came into the world,” “the hour”

of His glorification. The very setting of crime and passion which His

enemies sought to give to the manner of it only made it in His

estimation more divine. Instead of evading it He went straight to meet

it, when the time had come, as one who had a purpose to fulfil by it.

That purpose He announced to be the development of His personal

resources, the liberation of the creative energies of His being. As

uncrucified He might be weak, as crucified He would be so mighty as to

“draw all men unto Him.” The event amply fulfilled the prediction, for

shortly after the crucifixion Christ again confronted the world in

another form and in far greater power. The followers of Buddha went

forth testifying to his law, and they prefaced their preaching by the

invariable formula, “Thus have I heard, when the Blessed One lived in

——.” Their mission was simply to recall and declare and expound the

system of a master who had been absolutely lost to them, but the

apostles of Christ from the very first testified not of a doctrine, but

of Christ Himself, as one who having died still lived, was reigning in

mightier power, and would be with them always, even to the end of the

æon.

For we must bear in mind that Buddha and Christ stand in very contrasted

relations to the systems of belief which they each founded. Soon after

Buddha’s death, if not before it, the formula of admission into his

order began with the phrase, “I take refuge in Buddha,” which

consequently has been described by some as the “first article in the

Buddhist creed.” We must not for a moment however suppose that this

expression is of equal or even of similar significance to our

confession, “I believe in Christ.” Gotama in the whole course of his

preaching never asked his hearers for faith in himself as essential to

their emancipation. All that he demanded was obedience to the law,

disposition to enter, and determination to follow the paths which he had

discovered. He could not give them Nirvana, nor even bring them to it;

he could only tell them the way to it, which he had found, and as he had

succeeded so might they by their own individual energy.[144] We are thus

not free to explain Buddhism from and by the person of its founder; it

is perfectly explicable apart from him, as if he had never lived; but

apart from Christ, and without the light thrown upon it by His person,

Christianity would be an enigma. Christ from the first demanded faith in

Himself as essential to salvation.[145] Belief in what He taught was

always subordinated to trust in Himself. Consequently the apostles never

said, ‘Observe the precepts; follow the paths, and you will find the way

of escape,’ but always “Believe in (_or_ on) the Lord Jesus Christ and

thou shalt be saved.” They pointed to Him as the sole object of faith

and worship, as the only rule and example and inspiration. Their creed,

their theology, their ethical code, were not elaborated in systems; they

were all comprehended in a Person who required neither apologists nor

defenders, but only witnesses who would manifest and declare Him.

This must be borne in mind when we consider the miraculous elements

which are common to the presentation, given in both religions, of their

respective Authors. The story of Buddha, as we have hitherto followed

it, tells of a great renunciation, but of one that can hardly be called

unparalleled in the history of religion. He was probably neither the

first nor the last noble Indian youth who “for the sake of that supreme

goal of the higher life went out from all and every household gain and

comfort, to become a houseless wanderer.”[146] But the story as we have

it in the Buddhist books is very different.[147] Had any one asked a

yellow-robed missionary, about the time when the last Gospel was being

written, what he meant by the Buddha, he would have begun by telling of

one who, thousands of ages back, in the shining world of the gods, out

of pity for the miseries of men, resolved to become a Buddha that he

might teach them the way of deliverance, and who through many

transformations—in which he was baptized into all experiences, even

those of rat and a clod of earth—at last reached the point when, coming

down from heaven, and entering, in the form of a white elephant, the

side of the wedded wife[148] of a great king,[149] was born as Buddha.

He would tell of a mysterious baptism, when two full streams of perfumed

water fell from heaven upon him, while all the gods in all the worlds

raised in responsive harmony the heavenly song; of a holy sage who

descended from heaven to greet him with predictions of his glorious

career;[150] of many prodigies displayed by him in his illustrious

youth; of his mighty struggle with and victory over Mâra, Lord of all

Desires, and of his going forth as a great king, at the urgent request

of the great god Brahma, to preach Nirvana and deliver the world.

Then he would tell how when he set “a-rolling the wheel” of the “kingdom

of righteousness,”[151] he did so with such effect that not only

multitudes of men, but eighty thousand gods and angels, “hearing, each

in their own tongue, though the language was that of Magadha,”[152] were

by one sermon imbued with saving knowledge and converted; how during his

long and holy ministry, by discourses and parables and miracles, he

brought countless millions of men and women, and gods and sprites and

fairies, to find the right way; how the great devas came to worship or

to ask counsel from him;[153] how, inviolable and invincible, there

could not be found, either in this world or in the world of the devas,

Mâras, Brahmans, “any who could either scatter his thoughts or cleave

his heart”;[154] how he was transfigured,[155] and at last, when the

time was come, accompanied by a disciple very dear to him, how he lay

down like a king between two trees. Then when winds were hushed, and

streamlets silenced, and flowers from heaven shed their blossoms over

him like rain-drops, and a great earthquake rumbled, and the sun and

moon hid their faces, and the great Brahma lamented, rising through

light to light he achieved the full Nirvana.[156]

It is not wonderful that Christians who have only read or heard of the

statements current as to the remarkable coincidences between the

miraculous incidents recorded in the Buddhist legends and the Christian

Gospels should be perplexed, and that not a few of those who are

anti-Christian in their attitude should have almost jumped to the

conclusion that the biographers of the two lives must have known of each

other’s works and borrowed each other’s traditions. Examination of the

alleged coincidences, however, reveals that there is no occasion for the

perplexity in the one case, and no ground for the jubilation in the

other. By no honest process of manipulation can we turn the supposed

similarities into even probable identities. The incidents illustrate

very widely contrasted lives, and enforce dogmas utterly contradictory

to each other. If any one is desirous of ascertaining the coincidences

which are stated to exist, he will find them clearly set forth and

classified by Professor Seydel in his so-called Buddhist Harmony;[157]

and if he require any more than his own common sense to guide him to an

opinion concerning them, he had better consult the Appendix to Professor

Kuenen’s Hibbert Lectures on _National Religions and Universal

Religions_, Dr. Kellogg’s _Light of Asia and Light of the World_, and

Dr. J. Estlin Carpenter’s article in the _Nineteenth Century_, December

1880, “On the Obligations of the New Testament to Buddhism.” These

authorities will confirm the judgment which any unbiassed and

intelligent juryman would form, from considering the evidence adduced in

support of the theory of borrowing, and from a simple comparison of the

alleged parallels themselves, that Buddhism had not the smallest direct

influence on the origin of Christianity. So fundamentally unlike are the

alleged “similarities” that the hypothesis of the derivation of the

contents of the Gospels from Buddhist sources is as ridiculous as would

be the supposition that the Venus of Milo was copied from the rude idol

or hideous fetich of an aboriginal tribe.[158]

When the missionaries of the two religions first came into actual

contact has not yet been ascertained, and the influence of the Christian

ideals of self-oblivion upon the most essentially selfish system of

salvation ever promulgated to the world has yet to be traced. The

conception of self-renunciation which is set forth in the legends may

have originated in the memory of the kindness and gentleness and

goodness of one whose life was far nobler than his creed, and it may

have assumed greater strength and clearness when the teaching of the

Gospels came to be reflected upon it. It may or it may not, but of this

we may be positively certain, that the writers of the New Testament and

the composers of the earliest Buddhist traditions knew positively

nothing of each other’s productions. This is a conclusion accepted by

the very best authorities on the subject, and it is maintained with the

greatest firmness by those of them who discount the miraculous

occurrences found in the scriptures of both religions as only the fond

fancies which their affectionate disciples gradually wove around the

memories of their respective teachers. They hold that working

independently of each other, but under similar influences and in similar

conditions, it was simply natural that they should have come to adorn

with wonders somewhat alike in character the story of two lives so pure

and beneficial.

The learned author of the Hibbert Lectures for 1881 has made some very

interesting and important suggestions as to the rise of the Buddhist

legends, and as he seems to imply a similar growth of the “Christian

legend,” it may be advisable to consider both accounts in their relation

to the literary sources which profess to authenticate them. Let us

assume, therefore, that the Lalita Vistara was actually in circulation

about the beginning of the Christian era,[159] and let us take for

granted that one of the oldest Suttas,[160] professing to relate a

portion of Buddha’s ministry, was extant in the form in which we have

it, some three centuries earlier, or a century after Buddha’s death. A

comparison of these two productions reveals at once the fact that in the

earliest there is no reference to the divinity, pre-existence, or

supernatural birth of Buddha, and making allowance for the usual

exaggeration of language, that there are very few miraculous incidents

recorded in it. It has been asserted that Buddha never professed to work

a miracle. Certainly the fragments of his original teaching which

survive indicate that he would be the first to repudiate all such as

have been ascribed to him. Be that as it may, it is a literary fact that

in the supposed earliest books only a few miracles are recorded. We may

infer therefore that by the time they were composed his orthodox

disciples had not formed those conceptions of his person and mission

which their pious descendants later on learned to believe and to

proclaim.[161]

The Gospels are not the earliest Christian writings, and not several,

but many, “narratives concerning those matters which had been fulfilled

or established among” Christians, even as they “delivered them who were

eye-witnesses and ministers of the word,”[162] were probably in

circulation before the Gospels were written. Some of the Epistles of St.

Paul also, in all probability, preceded those collections of “the words

and deeds of the Lord”; but the substance of the three first Gospels was

very early produced, and we may be morally certain that they contain the

beliefs which the very first generation of Christians entertained

concerning Him. The truth of these beliefs is not now under discussion,

but only the fact of them, and the kind of people who were influenced by

them. It is averred “that the outward conditions in which Buddhism and

Christianity arose were similar, and so were the mental qualities of the

disciples of both religions”;[163] but the conditions were most

dissimilar in this respect, that Buddhism originated in the dimness of

an unhistoric age, and Christianity in an age and land so irradiated by

the light of history that we know more clearly what was happening then

and there than we do of what occurred in Europe a thousand years after.

The mental qualities of the disciples of both religions again seem to

have been most unlike. About Ananda and his companions we know really

nothing but the names, for they meet us in the Buddhist records as mere

lay figures, completely resembling one another, and with no

individuality to distinguish them.[164] We may assume, however, that

they belonged to one or other of the many sects of Brahmans or Sramans,

and if so, that they were dreamy and contemplative men, withdrawn from

practical life, and finding in the life of meditation a sphere more

congenial to them than the actual world of which they were parts. They

appear to have been directly and thoroughly unlike to the very marked

personalities represented by the Evangelists and the other apostles of

Christ, who were all drawn from practical life to be His followers. They

were the very reverse of speculative; they had little imagination and

almost no poetry in them; they were very dull of comprehension in regard

to truths higher than the few which they inherited, and very incredulous

about any unwonted occurrence said to have taken place outside the

little circle of their own observation. In their conscientious,

matter-of-fact way of looking at things they were the very last men to

dream dreams or weave legends around the memory of one whom they

revered; and we have their own confession, not of their slowness of

apprehension merely, but of their unbelief at first in regard to all

supernatural manifestations.

Now while the supernatural only rarely meets us in the most ancient

Buddhist productions, where we would naturally have expected it to have

predominated, it meets us in the very earliest writings of Christianity,

where we would not have expected it at all. Christ to His first

disciples and apostles was a miraculous being. The claim formulated in

St. John’s Gospel, which is probably the latest book in the New

Testament, is that advanced for Christ by St. Paul in his earliest

extant letter to the churches. The Christ of St. John is not a new

Person, but the same Divine Being of whom St. Paul says, “He being in

the form of God” was “found on earth in fashion as a man.” He may have

been all wrong as to the ground of his belief; he may have been an

epileptic, a visionary, a man subject to trances, whose intense

spiritual affinities disqualified him from judging calmly of matters of

history; but there is no mistake as to his own belief and that of the

other evangelists and writers of the New Testament. The teaching of St.

Paul and St. John concerning Christ is set forth in St. Matthew with a

clearness which no language can improve upon.[165] St. Mark dwells

primarily upon the humanity of Jesus, a most important fact, presenting

a historic basis without which Christian truth would have been little

more than a mystic speculation; but even in St. Mark that humanity is

not described as unfolding under conditions which are merely

normal.[166] The life to which he testifies is not just that of Jesus of

Nazareth, but of the Christ of God, who speaks with more than human

authority. The development which is traceable in the theology of the

Epistles is the expansion of the significance of the events recorded in

the Gospels. The latest writings may more fully interpret the teaching

of the earlier ones, but in them we find no other Gospels, but only

anathemas pronounced on those who pretend to have them. In them a larger

domain is seen expanding beneath our gaze, but it is visible only in the

light of the central figure that meets us in the first. Plainly,

therefore, while the earliest Buddhist witnesses account for their

master and his teaching in the ordinary ways, and while their successors

much later on in their attempts to embellish his portrait have produced

quite a different person from the man of whom they first testified, the

very earliest Christian writers could not account for Christ in any

other way than by regarding Him as a supernatural being, who did not

come into the world and did not leave it in the way of all other men. It

is possible that they may all have been deluded, but if so, they vouched

for their sincerity by their martyrdoms. The delusion, moreover, was at

least universally and most consistently maintained, and it is the first

instance in the history of mankind where a delusion has produced

intellectual activity and expansion so wonderful as to have changed the

current of history, and originated the great throbbing ever-enlarging

world of Christendom which confronts us now.

Another significant contrast between the two sets of writings is found

in the fact that while we can dissociate the miraculous elements from

the Buddhist Pitakas without detriment to their other contents, we find

it impossible to apply the same process with the like results to the New

Testament. No one questions that primitive Buddhism is improved by being

freed from the portents which subsequently gathered around it, for

primitive Buddhism is an intellectual and moral system, a theory of the

universe more likely to be obscured than elucidated by an appeal to the

supernatural. Christianity, however, while appealing both to intellect

and conscience, does so as the revelation of a life which, as a new

thing, might break through all men’s conceptions of what was ordinary or

necessary. The first appearance of life on this planet as an unwonted

phenomenon would be accompanied by manifestations miraculous to all who

only judged by experience of what had already been. So would be the

first appearance of man to those who judged of things by what was

possible to the actual animal world. That the manifestation of One who

had come that men might have life, and have it more abundantly, should

be accompanied with phenomena new and strange to mankind might have been

expected. Christ, as revealing an ideal of excellence to which things as

they are in nature, and men as they now are in society, do not conform,

will in truth contradict the present working of both. This at least is

the impression inevitably produced by the reading of the New Testament.

Its teaching is throughout founded upon, and it would be quite

unintelligible without reference to, the supernatural. To dissociate the

miraculous portions from the rest of its contents would be not only to

mutilate but to destroy it.[167] Not the theological and metaphysical

elements only, but even “the ethical, are so interwoven into one fibre

with the supernatural in the New Testament that it is impossible to

detach them without destroying the whole fabric.”[168] Verily a Gospel

without the miracles and all that accounts for them would be a very

strange book.

Another very distinctive feature in the New Testament accounts is

displayed in the character of the wonders there recorded. Indeed, this

distinguishing element is found in all the miraculous narratives of the

Bible. If it be true that the ancient writers or redactors of Scripture

have employed the legends of other nations to illustrate their works, it

must be conceded that they have immensely improved, and made a much

better use of them. The story of the creation of the world, of the

primeval paradise, and of the deluge, may be only myths common to

several nations, but somehow, while all other writers just lose

themselves in these myths, the Hebrews alone have laid hold of them to

enforce the sublimest views ever formulated in human speech concerning

the origin of the world and of man. The narratives of the Old Testament

are evidently not constructed to startle the reader with portents, but

to disclose the providential dealings of a holy and merciful God with

man to enlighten and save him. The Gospels in like manner are not

written to record miraculous occurrences, nor are miracles introduced to

glorify Christ: they are simply referred to as incidents in His

ministry. When we compare the prodigies ascribed to Buddha during the

many changes of his pre-existence, or during his ministry, with the

miracles of the Gospels, they are like the rough casts in clay or wood

made by a rude or childish people contrasted with the perfect

productions of nature in the world of animals or of men. They may endure

comparison with the portents found in the Apocryphal books, or in the

Lives of the Saints, but placed side by side with the Gospel miracles

they serve only to illustrate the difference between what is artificial

and grotesque, and what is original and natural. There is a marked

sobriety in the Gospel accounts totally lacking in the Buddhist legends.

The latter serve no other end but to exalt and magnify Buddha,[169] but

the Gospel miracles are all founded in some great human necessity which

they are intended to supply. The Buddhist marvels are simply produced to

startle us, the Christian are recorded as signs to instruct us. What a

gulf separates the conception of Buddha leaping high in air amid the

sounding of the bells of the heavens and the plaudits of all the gods,

just to prove that he was Buddha, from the account of Christ’s refusal

to work a miracle to win the adherence of the crowd, or give the sign

from heaven to vanquish Sadducean unbelief! The Gospel miracles are few

after all, but they all flow from and are in harmony with the original

idea of Christ as Messiah which is assumed in all the Gospels. The

mighty works done by Him are all such as might be expected to be done in

a world like this by the Son of a heavenly Father. The cure of all

manner of disease, the exorcism of all the evil spirits that have

afflicted humanity, the victory over death, the control of all the

forces of nature, were all in the scope of one who came hither to

establish the kingdom of God. Christ’s miracles were all signs of man’s

present and prophecies of his future relations to all the evils that

afflict him. They all remind us of the Divine original ideal that man,

perfectly obedient to God, must exercise dominion over His creatures in

this world. Man’s present antagonism to nature, and the disorder seen in

his own social relations, are alike due to his refusal to merge his will

in God’s, and the miracles of our Saviour are all prophecies that when

through obedience to or faith in God he shall be restored to holiness,

he will find his social and external relations improved, and will regain

over nature that spiritual authority which even already the winds and

the waves in part recognise and obey.[170]

Again, the New Testament writers claim for Christ what the early

disciples of Buddha never dreamed of claiming for their master, and they

insist upon their claim, though it is associated with the meanest and

apparently most contradictory of elements. It is not the glorification

but the humiliation of Christ which constitutes the marvel in the

Gospels. It was very natural that the Evangelists should imagine that

the angels should sing over the birth of a Saviour, but it was not

natural that they should conceive of them singing over a babe in a

manger. It was not wonderful, again, for Jews to believe that the coming

of their Messiah was divinely announced, but it is very wonderful that

they should believe that this annunciation was made to unknown

shepherds. It was certainly not in that way their Messiah was expected

to come. Had He come in the way they expected, the miracles might

naturally have been accounted for which they associated with His coming;

but, as matter of fact, it requires the miracle to account for their

belief in Him. And so it is all through in the Gospels. That the Messiah

should be discovered to be the Son of God need not surprise us, but that

the Son of God should be recognised by Jews in the form of a servant,

enduring patiently the contradiction of sinners, submitting to trial, to

torture, to death on the cross, is one of the greatest marvels in the

whole history of religion. This combination of glory and shame was a

difficulty in the way of faith, not a help or support of it. The claim,

we must remember, was not advanced for Christ by the Evangelists after

He died; it was formulated by Himself, and by Him it was asserted more

conspicuously, and with greater frequency and emphasis toward the close

of His earthly life. It was the only charge on which He was condemned;

all other accusations brought against Him broke down; but this one He

admitted—that He called Himself the Son of God. Questioned upon it, He

would not retract. “Thou sayest,” was all His reply, and for the saying

He was ordered to the cross. Yet upon the cross His assertion was

strengthened. Had He been a pretender, He would never have so comported

Himself before Pilate and Herod; had He been self-deluded, He never

would have said to His fellow-sufferer on Calvary: “To-day shalt thou be

with me in paradise.” The torture of crucifixion was sufficient to expel

the hallucinations of the maddest brain, but the Evangelists show that

while faith in His Messiahship was, during His crucifixion, fading even

from His disciples, in Himself it was stronger than ever, and at the

very last it was communicated to a dying robber, who trusted that He had

power to absolve him, and to open to him the gates of a better life.

Now, all this surely never could naturally have occurred to Jewish men

to conceive, and if their records be only fictions, the devout creations

of over fond imaginations, then their legends are miracles themselves.

Some one has said that it is possible to find in the Buddhist books a

parallel to every incident in the Gospels; if so, these parallels will

be found to be very far apart; but to the incident of the Crucifixion

there can be no parallel. That one historical event separates not only

the two systems of thought and belief, but marks off Christianity from

all other religions in the world. Till the crucifixion of Jesus was

accomplished, the idea of associating with Deity humiliation, and of

conceiving of God as dying the death of a slave upon the cross, would

have been regarded as the grossest impiety. The fundamental idea of the

Incarnation was not wholly foreign to the mind either of India or of

Greece; to the Jew it was not a natural thought, but one so anti-Semitic

that Jew and Moslem alike have rejected Christianity because of it;[171]

but the incarnation of Deity represented in the Gospels, the humiliation

of the Godhead implied in the Crucifixion, is an idea which never could

have originated in the mind of either Gentile or Jew. It is one of the

things of God which the natural man cannot conceive, a mystery hid from

all ages until it was revealed, and apparently, unless we admit the

reality of the revelation, we never can account for the faith.

The miraculous personality of Christ is thus the outstanding and

distinctive feature of the Christian writings. As the mists clear away

in the East, Buddha emerges more and more in the stature of a good and

great man, but Christ rises upon us as one who cannot be accounted for

according to the measure of any man, nor even that of an angel. It is

not as a teacher, a guide out of the difficulties of life, that He meets

us, but as a Revealer and Saviour. It is thus He has been accepted by

His disciples, and upon their faith He has reared His Church. It is thus

He conceived of Himself, and His conception is not more astounding than

are the simplicity and lowliness and meekness of His character. He is

Himself thus the miracle of miracles, wholly inexplicable on any human

theory devised to account for Him; and till that one miracle is solved,

all questions as to the miracles which are ascribed to Him can afford to

wait for their solution.

We have no desire to exaggerate the value of the miraculous elements in

Christianity, but it does not appear to be true wisdom that would

depreciate them or ignore them altogether. Miracles by many have been

wrongly considered, and they have been often expounded by the advocates

of Christianity in such a way as to create instead of removing

difficulties connected with the faith. On the other hand, many who

reject or refuse to consider them seem afflicted by a kind of mental

semeiophobia which in its own way may be as dangerous an affliction as

hydrophobia is. The proper way is to consider them in relation to the

nature and purpose of the Revelation with which they are associated. The

miracle may sometimes be found only in the form of the narrative, as a

hieroglyph whose purpose we are too lazy to search for, whose meaning we

are too stupid to elucidate. The theory that miracles are only

figurative expressions of spiritual truth is not true, as it is

generally expounded; but it has a truth in it which must never be

overlooked. Every miracle is a parable, and every parable is a miracle.

It is the spiritual reality revealed by both which gives them value, and

not the wonder in them by which we are at first arrested. Yet without

the wonder to arrest us we might never have received the revelation.

“What did the apostle mean,” asks Robert Elsmere,[172] “by death to sin

and self? what the precise idea attached by him to being risen with

Christ? Are this death and resurrection necessarily dependent upon

certain alleged historical events, or are they not primarily, and were

there not, even in Paul’s mind, two aspects of a spiritual process

perpetually re-enacted in the soul of man, and constituting the

veritable revelation of God? Which is the stable and lasting witness of

the Father? the spiritual history of the individual and of the world, or

the envelope of miracle to which hitherto mankind has attached such

importance?” The envelope certainly would be as worthless without the

message which it carries as a husk from which the kernel has dropped.

Would St. Paul, however, ever have conceived the spiritual truths

referred to, if they had not been suggested by historical facts? Could

he ever have conceived of a death to sin had the world never witnessed

the death of the Holy Christ upon the cross? Could he ever have dreamed

of rising again in the power of a new life if the tomb in the garden

nigh Golgotha had never been found empty of its crucified occupant? Is

he not just suggesting the significance of very exceptional historical

events? He may be wrong in his interpretation, but there can be no

mistake that the interpretation is founded upon the history, that it was

the event which originated his theory, and not his theory that produced

the story of the event. Christian theology, instead of giving this

miraculous character to the tragic story of the life and death of

Christ, has been called into existence by man’s endeavours to account

for it as a fact not only marvellous, but simply unique in the

experience of mankind.

It is not likely that the miraculous elements in the Christian religion

will be found to be “the produce of its primitive theology, which will

fade out of the conception of men as theology advances and becomes

purified.” The demonstration of this must not be assumed to be complete

because the miraculous is also found in other religions. We must be able

to account for it in all of them. It is, indeed, the natural tendency of

humanity to magnify and eventually to deify its heroes, to embellish

their careers with similar marvels, to apply to them figurative language

very liable to be misunderstood, which in later generations hardens into

erroneous beliefs. That Christians as well as Buddhists have done so is

sufficiently attested by the apocryphal Gospels, but we must not

conclude that because there are so many fictitious and counterfeit

wonders in currency there can be no real miracles. We must examine each

religion on its merits, and its miraculous elements in the light of

their purpose and of their actual genesis; and if we do so in the case

of Christianity, we will probably discover the one supernatural reality

from which the shadows in all other religions are reflected, and to

which they all point.[173]

Dr. Rhys Davids, in the Hibbert Lectures, informs us that the early

Buddhist conception of Gotama was dominated and transformed by two

ideals, neither of which had any necessary connection with the man

himself. One of them, due to political experience, made him finally

assume in the popular imagination the office of a Universal King; while

the other, due to philosophic speculation, invested him with the

attribute of Perfect Wisdom. The implied parallel between this

conception, coloured as it grew by the sun myths which it incorporated,

and the Christian conception of Jesus, suggested by the titles King of

Glory and Divine Word, is obvious to everybody. Yet examination of the

supposed similarities only reveals essential contrasts between the two

sets of beliefs. The political experiences in India which are referred

to occurred about two centuries after the death of Buddha. The victories

of Chandragupta, resulting in the consolidation of a kingdom such as

Indians had never before witnessed, combined with his patronage of the

Buddhist monks, may have suggested the idea of the universal monarch.

“His achievements recalled the nearly forgotten poetry of the Vedic

legends, while the new and popular ethics of Buddha invested him with a

righteousness which made him a worthy Lord of the Four Quarters (of the

Globe).” So in one of the Suttas, said to be early, and which may have

been assuming shape at this time, words like these are put in the mouth

of Buddha:—“I am a king, O Sela, an incomparable, religious king; with

justice I roll the wheel, the wheel that is irresistible.”[174] With

this conception of Cakka-vatti, a glorious king, was connected, avers

Dr. Rhys Davids, that of an age in which plenty and peace were to abound

as the fruits of righteousness.[175] The idea of a golden age is common

to most religions, and as the Western Aryans always preserved it, we may

conclude that the branch which reached India carried it thither with

them. Soon, however, as the belief in transmigration took possession of

them, they seem to have lost it. Their book of the generations of man

did not mount higher than the Fall; existence was essentially evil in

their thought, and belief in a golden age on earth, either in the past

or in the future, was quite inconsistent with the creed which Buddhists

inherited or created. The other branch of the Aryan stock so cherished

it that it adorns their most beautiful mythologies; but even with them

the golden age was always placed in the past, and the world, fallen from

good, was supposed to be degenerating from bad to worse. And so it is

that the fondest glances of even the happy Greek are not forward but

backward cast, and that sadness mingles with his most mirthful music.

It is possible at least that changes so favourable to the fortunes of

the new religion, and the social reforms which followed its extension,

may have awakened in the pious the memories of old Vedic faith; and that

the victories of Chandragupta may have suggested to the authors of the

Suttas the idea of the invincible Buddha advancing through the ages, as

the chariot-wheel of the sun disperses the clouds in the heavens. It is

certain, however, that neither Buddha nor his earliest disciples ever

dreamed of applying the title of Cakka-vatti to or of associating the

promise of a better time with himself. To old Vedic faith as supporting

his teaching or predicting his mission he never appealed; he ignored all

previous teaching: and indeed in ancient Indian teaching, uninspired by

either promise or hope, there is nothing prophetic. In the case of

Christianity it is quite the contrary. The conception of the Messiah as

the righteous and glorious King, under whose reign all the world would

be blessed, was not suggested by political experience two centuries

after the dawn of Christianity. It was formulated and predicted many

centuries before the coming of Christ. The Hebrew, like the Aryan, never

lost the memory of a happy past, but, unlike the Aryan, he placed his

paradise not only in the past but in the future. With far richer

materials at his command than the Aryan seems to have possessed for

painting a vanished golden age, the Hebrew poets made very sparing use

of them. A few paragraphs exhaust all they have to say as to the

traditions of a paradise that had been lost, but their whole Bible is

full of the hope of the good time which is coming to all the world. This

hope, centred as it was in their Messiah, Christianity from the very

first took up and promised to fulfil. The ministry of Jesus was scarcely

begun before it was associated with Him. Among the first questions asked

concerning Him was, “Is not this Messias?” Among the earliest

declarations made was, “We have found the Messias.” Very soon in His

career He confessed, “I that speak unto thee am He!” The Gospels and

Epistles would be unintelligible without this perpetual reference to

Messianic prediction; it is the golden thread which runs through all the

Old Testament and unites it with the New. In its Messianic hope, Old

Testament prophecy reached its highest and purest development, and the

New Testament claims that in Christ it is finding its fulfilment. It may

be alleged of course that the prophecy and the claim are alike

delusions, but the prophecy at least was a fact, and its application to

Christ was no legendary growth of a later generation, but the original

and essential testimony of the earliest Christian teachers.

The other conception of Perfect Wisdom represented by Buddha the

Awakened or Enlightened One is also confessedly an aftergrowth. The

earliest traces which we have of Gotama after his death disclose him as

a man who gained his knowledge by severe struggle, and who therefore, in

the estimation of his followers, was a “Jina” or conqueror. As time went

on, and his memory rose in the estimation of later generations, the

faithful, guided by their belief in transmigration, projected this

struggle for Buddhahood further and further into former stages of

existence, till at last the idea was conceived that he was only one of a

long series of Buddhas, of whom he was not to be the last. The

development of this interesting speculation, with its distinctions into

Buddhas who only save themselves—Paccekabuddhas—and the Sammâsambuddhas,

who appear at very rare intervals, able and willing to save to the

uttermost, need not here be traced. It is sufficient to note how unlike

and contradictory is this belief to that which dominates in our

religion. In Christ we have the _only_ Messiah, and He, having once

come, we do not look for another. The hope of the Christian is fixed

upon His coming again in glory; but it is the coming again of the _same_

Jesus. The unity of Deity colours and pervades all our thoughts of

Divine communications with mankind; “there is one God, and one Mediator

between God and man.” Consequently the doctrine of the Divine Word

formulated in connection with Christ in St. John’s Gospel represents a

very different set of ideas from the conception of Buddha as the Perfect

Wisdom, to whom all worlds and all times were open. That conception of

Buddha was probably an incorporation into the Buddhist creed from

foreign sources, but the idea of Christ as the Son, “unto whom all

things have been delivered by the Father,” so that “no one knoweth the

Son save the Father, neither doth any know the Father save the Son, and

he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal Him,” was a common one among

the very earliest Christians of whom we have any trace. St. Matthew, St.

Mark, St. Paul, St. Luke all preach Christ, “unto whom has been

committed all knowledge and judgment,” “who is before all things, and in

whom all things consist,” “the image of the invisible God, in whom it

pleased the Father that all fulness should dwell.”[176]

And so it is not in the latest Gospel but in the earliest Scriptures

that we have the first indications of this doctrine as Christ the Word,

though in the latest, as we might expect, it is more clearly formulated

and more fully expounded. Written after the fall of Jerusalem, the

destruction of the ancient Church, and the recognition of the Gentiles

as fellow-heirs, by one who was quite conscious of the new intellectual

position which Christianity occupied in relation to the speculations of

Syria and Egypt, and of the dangers which thereby accrued to the faith,

its author took up a term very current at the time in theosophic and

metaphysical writings, and specially those of Philo, to set forth the

truth of the Life whose manifestation he had witnessed. That St. John

did not borrow the term from Philo is evident from the very different

use which he has made of it, and the very different purpose which he had

in view. By it Philo expressed the conception of Divine intelligence in

the abstract, while St. John employed it to suggest the concrete idea of

God’s personal action. Both found it in the Septuagint and the Hebrew

traditional lore;[177] but while Philo gave it a Greek, St. John adhered

to its Hebrew significance. The first chapter of St. John compared with

a page of Philo[178] will reveal at once the difference between them,

and convince us that the teaching of Philo concerning the Logos leads

further and further away from the idea of the incarnation which is the

foundation-truth of the teaching of St. John. His doctrine would be

quite unintelligible as an application or continuation of the doctrine

of Philo, but it is intelligible and consistent as the final

co-ordination of truths concerning the Divine Being disclosed in the Old

Testament viewed by a man whose antecedents and modes of thought were

very different from those of the Alexandrian sage.[179]

The ideas suggested by the “Angel of the Presence” in the historic and

prophetic books, by the “Word of the Lord” in the Psalms, and by

“Wisdom” in the Books of Wisdom, indicate the rays which converge in St.

John’s doctrine of the Christ. As one who tarried long after the first

generation of Christians had gone to their rest, as one who had not only

pondered longer, and in deeper silence, the Life he had seen manifested,

but who had found its interpretation in such providences as the

spreading of the Churches and the destruction of the State, he was abler

to meet the necessities of a wider age, by setting the truth in rounder

form and clearer light; but while he expands and expounds the teaching

of the first generation, he adds and introduces not a single element.

His testimony is identical with that proclaimed at the Resurrection,

that Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ, and that Christ is the only

begotten Son of God.

It is not as one who has acquired truth by long struggle, not as one who

has fought or forced His way to light, that Christ presents Himself in

the Gospels, but as one who can say: “I am the way, the truth, the

life,” “the light of the world.” Yet along with this stupendous demand

upon the faith of humanity there is a humility and simplicity

undiscoverable in the Buddha of the Pitakas. Self-consciousness,

self-reliance, self-culture—these are the phrases most suggestive of the

system and of the life of the great Indian sage, while not

self-abasement, but self-oblivion, characterises the teaching and life

of Jesus of Nazareth. Identity with the Highest, manifested by absolute

surrender to Him, is the essence of the Revelation of Christ. Always is

the Father confessed to be the source of all grace and truth, and if the

Son asks to be glorified, it is that the Father may be glorified in Him.

We are certainly not contemplating similarities when we look at the

Buddha of the Suttas and the Christ of the Gospels, but contrasts more

widely separated than the soul is from the body. In Buddha we have a

historical personage, who can be thoroughly accounted for as the product

and outgrowth of his past, and of his environment; in Christ we have one

whom no philosophy of history has ever explained. Alone and

unapproachable, He meets us as one who is really human, because He has

become man, one who has arisen among men to save them, but because He

has come through and to them. He is not just one of the many, a son of

men, the product of a divinely-trained humanity, but the Son of Man, who

as Son of God, incarnated in the nature of all men, has become the Head

and Creator of a new humanity. Correct, improve, embellish as we may,

the portrait left us of the gentle teacher of Magadha, we never can lift

him up to that level which would justify his being worshipped or being

addressed, as Jesus of Nazareth has been by the consensus of all the

Christian ages, “Thou art the King of Glory, O Christ. Thou art the

everlasting Son of the Father.”

Footnote 120:

_E.g._ Sinai = Hagar (Gal. iv. 24-31); also Claudius = ὁ κατέχων (2

Thess. ii. 6, 7); Hausrath, _Life and Times of Jesus_, vol. i. p. 77.

Footnote 121:

Derenbourg, _Hist. de la Palestine d’après les Talmuds_, pp. 159, 202.

Footnote 122:

Wellhausen, _The Pharisees and Sadducees_, pp. 8, 26-43; Greifswald,

1874.

Footnote 123:

Jos. _Antiq._ xiii. 5. 9, xv. 10. 4, 5; _Bell. Jud._ ii. 8. 2, 14.

Footnote 124:

Keim, _Jesus of Nazara_, vol. i. p. 392.

Footnote 125:

Delitzsch, _Jesus and Hillel_, pp. 31 _seq._; Pirké Abôth, Cambridge,

1877, _passim_.

Footnote 126:

Jos. _Antiq._ xvii. 4.

Footnote 127:

Philo, _Quod omnis Probus Liber_, p. 12.

Footnote 128:

Bühler, _Ind. Ant._ vol. vii. p. 143; Jacobi, “Mahâvira and his

Predecessors,” _Ind. Ant._ vol. viii. pp. 311-314; Kern, _History of

Buddhism in India_, vol. i. p. 143; Colebrooke’s _Essays_, vol. i. p.

380.

Footnote 129:

See “Jainism,” by Dr. Shoolbred—Report of the Missionary Conference,

1888, vol. i. p. 41; Wilson’s _Essays_, vol. i. p. 427 _seq._

Footnote 130:

“Sramana,” in Brahman speech, was a man who performed hard penances,

from _sram_, to work hard. There is another Sanscrit root, _sam_, to

quiet, and from it afterwards the popular etymology derived the word.

See Professor Max Müller’s translation of the Dhammapada in _Sacred

Books of the East_, vol. x. p. 65 _note_.

Footnote 131:

There seems to have been four great divisions of Sramanas, with as

many as sixty-three philosophical systems represented by them. The

Brahmanas were also similarly divided. See Sutta Nipâta, _Sacred Books

of the East_, vol. xi. Part ii. pp. 15, 16, 88, 93.

Footnote 132:

Oldenberg, _Buddha, etc._, p. 71.

Footnote 133:

See _Year-Book of Protestant Theology_ for 1883 for an account of the

views of Professor Loman of Amsterdam.

Footnote 134:

M. Senart, _Legend of Buddha_, Paris, 1875; Kern, _History of Buddhism

in India_: Schoebel. _Buddh. Actes de la Soc. Philol._; Paris, 1874,

vol iv. pp. 160 _seq._

Footnote 135:

Annual Report of the Asiatic Society; Paris, July 1875.

Footnote 136:

Cunningham, _Ancient Geog. of India_, vol. i. p. 147; Oldenberg,

_Buddha, etc._, p. 95; Beal, _Chinese Buddhism_, p. 67.

Footnote 137:

“Mâra eat le démon de l’amour, du péché et de la mort,” says Burnouf

in his _Introduction to the Study of Indian Buddism_, p. 76; see also

Sutta Nipâta, _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. x. Part ii. p. 159, for

the popular conception of Buddha’s temptation; the arrows of Mâra are

“flower-pointed,” like Kama’s, the Hindu god of love. See Dhammapada,

_Sacred Books of the East_, vol. x. Part i. p. 17.

Footnote 138:

Geikie, _Life of Christ_, vol. i. p. 449.

Footnote 139:

Mahavagga, i. 5. 2; _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. xvii.

Footnote 140:

This is not the place to discuss the substance of their respective

teachings. Their aims seemed to be similar, for both proclaimed

freedom to be gained by the Truth, or saving knowledge, but their

conceptions of the knowledge that saves are as widely contrasted as

are their ideas of salvation. If we put the Sermon on the Mount side

by side with Buddha’s first sermon (translated in vol. xi. p. 146 of

_Sacred Books of the East_) we find contradiction in almost every

sentence. “Blessed are the poor in spirit” is an utterance not only

foreign to but in direct antithesis to the preaching of Buddha. He has

no sympathy with the “poor in spirit,” if we take the phrase in the

light of the old Hebrew concept of it. His benediction is reserved for

the self-conscious and self-reliant, who are bent upon self-culture

and self-development. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy

heart, etc., and thy neighbour as thyself.” Buddha found no higher to

adore, and no other than self to consider. The moral precepts in his

law are based on no appeal to conscience, and are inspired by no sense

of duty. Others were regarded as the occasion for winning merit, and

kindness done to them was not done for their sake, but with the view

of securing the safety of the doer.

Footnote 141:

Dr. Oldenberg (_Buddha, etc._, p. 148) very properly remarks that

Ambapali the courtesan was no Mary Magdalene, and that she was not

regarded by Buddha as the woman that was a sinner was regarded by

Christ. Buddha had not Christ’s horror of sin, and therefore felt none

of His boundless pity for the frailty of its victims; of hatred of sin

in the Christian sense Buddhism knows nothing. Its highest virtue is

imperturbability, a serenity that is apathetic in regard to the most

outrageous wrong or the most heinous wickedness. Cariya Pitaka, iii.

15; also _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. x. Part ii. p. 151.

Footnote 142:

Bishop Bigandet, _Life of Gaudama_, p. 287; Professor H. Wilson,

_Essays_, vol. ii. p. 243; Wheeler, _History of India_, vol. iii. p.

139; Oldenberg, _Buddha, etc._, p. 148; Mahâparanibhâna Sutta, in

_Sacred Books of the East_, vol. xi. pp. 71, 72.

Footnote 143:

Mahâparanibhâna Sutta, vi. 10, _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. xi. p.

114. Dr. Edkins, in _Chinese Buddhism_, p. 57, gives a version of an

appearance of Buddha after cremation to his mother, Máya, who came

down from heaven to see his coffin. Professor Childers finds no trace

in any Pali earliest literature of any belief in Buddha’s existence

after death (_Dictionary of Pali Language_, p. 472, note 1).

Footnote 144:

Oldenberg, _Buddha, etc._, pp. 322, 323; Kuenen, Hibbert Lectures, p.

264.

Footnote 145:

In the Bhagavadgitá loving devotion for Krishna is demanded as the

only means of salvation; but Krishna-worship began very considerably

later than the origin of Christianity. Professor Müller admits

(Gifford Lectures, p. 99) that Christian influences were possible

then, but says that there is no necessity for admitting them. He cites

the passage from Bhagavad. ix. 29 (_Sacred Books of the East_, vol.

viii. p. 34), “They who worship me with devotion or love, they are in

me, and I in them,” as an interesting parallel to John vi. 7 and xvii.

23, but we must remember that St. John’s words were circulating all

over the world for generations before these were penned.

Footnote 146:

Mahavagga, v. 1. 18.

Footnote 147:

The Lalita Vistara, of which there are many versions, is the chief

authority for the legends. In the _Buddhist Birth-Stories_, translated

by T. W. Rhys Davids, in Bigandet’s _Life of Gaudama_, and Spence

Hardy’s Manual (_Legends of the Buddhists_), in the _Romantic Legend_

of Sakya Buddha, translated by Professor S. Beal, will be found a

large and interesting miscellany of the prodigies connected with the

coming of Buddha.

Footnote 148:

A wife, not a virgin; _Romantic Legend_, pp. 32, 36, 37, 41.

Footnote 149:

Lalita Vistara, p. 63, Calcutta edition; _Buddhist Birth-Stories_, pp.

62, 68.

Footnote 150:

Nalaka Sutta, Sutta Nipâta, xi. 1. 20, 21; _Sacred Books of the East_,

vol. x. Asita, the aged ascetic, is said to have ascended to heaven

after his daily repast, and upon finding the gods in joyful commotion

he at length returned to see the new-born wonder (_Birth-Stories_, p.

69).

Footnote 151:

Title given by the translator of the Dhanima-Kakka-ppavatana Sutta, in

vol. xi. of _Sacred Books of the East_.

Footnote 152:

Spence Hardy, _Manual of Buddhism_, p. 187, quoting the Pujáwaliya,

said to be later than the thirteenth century A.D.

Footnote 153:

Sutta Nipâta, _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. x. Part ii. p. 17.

Footnote 154:

_Ibid._ vol. x. Part ii. pp. 31, 45.

Footnote 155:

Mahâparanibhâna Sutta, iv. 49, 50, _ibid._ vol. xi. p. 81.

Footnote 156:

Bigandet, _op. cit._ p. 323; Spence Hardy, _Manual_, p. 347;

Mahâparinibhâna Sutta, vi. 11-16.

Footnote 157:

_Das Evangelium von Jesu in seinen Verhältnissen zur Buddha-Sage und

Buddha-Lehre_; Leipzig, 1882.

Footnote 158:

Let any one compare the prediction of the so-called Indian Simeon, the

Nalaka Sutta, in vol. x. p. 125 of _Sacred Books of the East_, with

Luke ii. 25; the account of the Temptation by Mara, in the _Romantic

Legend_, pp. 204, 224, or in Hardy’s _Manual of Buddhism_, p. 183,

with Matt. iv. 1; the so-called Transfiguration in Mahâparinibhâna,

iv. 49, vol. xi. _Sacred Books of the East_, p. 81, with Matt. xvii.

1-8; the feast of the courtesan Ambopali, in Mahâparinibhâna Sutta,

ii. 16. 25, _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. xi. p. 30, with Christ’s

treatment of the Magdalene in Luke vii. 36, and he will see at once

how improbable and even absurd is the theory that the Evangelists

borrowed from the Buddhist compilers. That we are dealing with quite

an inferior order of facts is apparent when we compare one of the most

touching coincidences, Buddha’s last discourse to the Beloved Ananda

in Mahâparinibhâna Sutta, v. 34. 35, “Let not yourself be troubled,”

with John xiv. 1-6. In some of the miracles accompanying the birth and

temptations of Buddha, there are not only gross absurdities but

positive indecencies, which by the simplicity and modesty and

reticence of the Gospel narratives are powerfully condemned. See

_Lalita Vistara_, chaps. vi. and vii., and _Buddhist Birth-Stories_,

vol. i. pp. 58, 68.

Footnote 159:

This is a very great assumption indeed. Foucaux, its translator,

assigns it to the first century B.C., but T. W. Rhys Davids assigns it

to some Nepaulese poet “who lived between six hundred and a thousand

years after Buddha’s death” (Hibbert Lectures, pp. 197, 204). A

Chinese version is said to have been in existence about 70 A.D.

Rajendralal Mitra, its English translator, admits this in his

Introduction, p. 48, but whether that was a version, or another book

altogether, or how far it corresponded with the _Lalita Vistara_, no

scholar has been confident to say. Dr. Beal also mentions a life of

Buddha by Asvaghosha as probably in circulation about the middle of

the Christian era (_Chinese Buddhism_, p. 73).

Footnote 160:

Mahâparinibhâna Sutta, translated by T. W. Rhys Davids, _Sacred Books

of the East_, vol. xi.

Footnote 161:

The blessed Buddha rebuked Pindola Bhâradvâga (for having won a bowl

of sandalwood by performing a miracle), saying, “This is improper, not

according to rule, unsuitable, unworthy of a Samana, unbecoming, and

ought not to be done. How can you for the sake of a miserable wooden

pot display before the laity the superhuman quality of your miraculous

power of Iddhi?... This will not conduce either to the conversion of

the unconverted or to the increase of the converted” (Kullavagga, v.

8. 2). The danger of performing a miracle by power of Iddhi, for

self-glorification, is exemplified in the story of Devadatta in

Kullavagga, vii. 1. 2, 3. In the Mahavagga, Kullavagga, Sutta Nipâta,

and similar books, however, miracles are ascribed to Buddha, and

conversions attributed to their performance.

Footnote 162:

Luke i. 1.

Footnote 163:

T. W. Rhys Davids, Hibbert Lectures, p. 128.

Footnote 164:

Oldenberg, _Buddha, etc._, p. 190.

Footnote 165:

Matthew xi. 27; xxviii. 16-20.

Footnote 166:

Mark i. 7-11; ii. 10-28; viii. 38; xii. 35-37.

Footnote 167:

Pressensé, _Vie de Jésus_, p. 373.

Footnote 168:

Cox, _Commentary on Job_, p. 19.

Footnote 169:

See Mahavagga, i. pp. 15-20, for specimens of the “three thousand five

hundred” wonders of Buddha. “The marvellous in the Gospels is but

sober good sense compared with what we find in ... the Hindu European

mythologies” (Renan, _Études d’histoire Relig._ pp. 177, 203).

Footnote 170:

Godet, _Lectures in Defence of the Christian Faith_, pp. 118-161.

Footnote 171:

Dr. Dods, _Mohammed, Buddha, and Christ_, p. 201; Dr. Fairbairn,

_Studies in Religion as a Philosophy_, p. 36.

Footnote 172:

p. 58, one-vol. edition.

Footnote 173:

Trench, Hulsean Lectures, p. 150.