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]]