Chanakya, Zacha, or, as our registers have it, Macha,[335] one of the personifications of Budh, the general appellative of those heaven-sent devotees, was so startling a paragon of human impeccability, as to inspire his followers with the conviction of his being an incarnation of the Godhead.
He is stated to have been the son of one of the most powerful of eastern kings; but, according to their preconceived notions of the future Redeemer, born of his mother without any knowledge of the other sex.
The circumstances attendant upon his infantine education, and the precocity of his parts, favoured an inauguration upon which their fancies had been long riveted. After a laborious ordeal of pious austerity, not without miraculous proofs and other intimations of Divine approval, he was duly admitted to the honour of canonisation, and entered, accordingly, upon his task of consigned Saviour of the world.
The encounters with which he had to contend, in this uphill work, against flesh and blood, were those which were, afterwards, again combated by the admitted Saviour whom he had personated. The same faults he reprehended; the same weakness he deplored; the same hypocrisy he rebuked; and the same virtues he inculcated. The purification of the inner spirit was the object which both professed, and the improvement of human morals in social intercourse and relation, the evidence in practice, upon which both equally insisted.
If Christ promised a heaven to the votaries of His truths, Budha did a nirwana to his disciples and imitators: and though the former place, to our imagination, sounds replete with all delights, while the latter is merely figured as exempt from all painfulness, yet both agree in one particular, not a little soothing to wounded hope, in being essentially such, as where “the wicked cease from troubling, and where the weary are at rest.”
But great as was the resemblance which the personal example and the doctrinal lessons of Macha and Christ bore to one another, it was as nothing compared to the almost incredible similitude of their respective departures. They both died the inglorious death of the cross to reconcile man to his offended Creator; and in confident dependence upon the best authenticated assurance, exulted on the occasion, however galling the process, of expiating, by their own sufferings, the accumulated sins of humanity.
Is it to be wondered at, therefore, that the traces which they have left behind them, in their different ages, should bear an analogy to one another? Or would not the wonder rather be that they did not, in all respects, harmonise?
“Let not the piety of the Catholic Christian,” says the Rev. Mr. Maurice, “be offended at the preceding assertion, that the cross was one of the most usual symbols among the hieroglyphics of Egypt and India. Equally honoured in the Gentile and the Christian world, this emblem of universal nature, of that world to whose quarters its diverging radii pointed, decorated the hands of most of the sculptured images in the former country, and in the latter stamped its form upon the most majestic of the shrines of their deities.”[336]
The fact alone is here attested to: not a syllable is said as to the reason why: and though I cannot but recognise the scruples of the writer, nor withhold my admiration from the rotundity in which the diction has been cast, yet the reader must have seen that, as to actual illustration, it is—like the Rev. Mr. Deane’s flourish about the worship of the serpent—“Vox et præterea nihil!”[337]
“You do err, not knowing the Scriptures,”[338] said a Master, without pride, and who could not err. If the remark applied in His day, it is not the less urgent in ours. So astounding did the correspondence between the Christian and the Budhist doctrines appear to the early missionaries to Thibet and the adjacent countries—a correspondence not limited to mere points of faith and preceptorial maxims, but exhibiting its operation in all the outward details of form, the inhabitants going even so far as to wear crosses around their necks—that Thevenot, Renaudot, Lacroze, and Andrada, have supposed in their ignorance of the cause of such affinity, that Budhism must have been a vitiation of Christianity before planted; whereas Budhism flourished thousands of years before it, or Brahminism either; and this cross was the symbol of Budha crucified.