Buddhism and Christianity: A Parallel and a Contrast

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.

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.

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.

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.