Both were surrounded by an Oriental environment. Their antecedents and their prepossessions were of the East, eastern; and at their births they were introduced to scenes and began to breathe the atmosphere of the Orient. All the great founders of the World Religions were men of the East. This was doubtless because the East kept more closely than the West in touch with deepest religious thought and was animated with highest religious emotions and heavenly aspirations. Certainly the world owes more to ancient Asia for its religious life and spiritual attainments than to all the other continents put together. And Asia is to be thanked, above all, because she gave to mankind the Christ and the Buddha. For the eastern flavour of their messages and the Oriental tints of their life we are deeply grateful. To those of the West, these have always brought quiet restraint and a hallowed, peaceful repose to counteract the hurry and worry of life to which they are so much exposed and which are a part of their very being.
II
The Common Principles which controlled their Lives
Both were men of deepest sincerity. All sham and hypocrisy were foreign to their nature; they held insincerity in any one to be the meanest and most deadly sin. To this intense loyalty to the truth, Jesus bore emphatic testimony by an early martyrdom; while Gautama gave the same unwavering witness by a long and holy life. They both stood in the midst of communities which were rotten with hypocrisy and which were using religion as a sacred garb of duplicity and were raising temples of dishonesty to enraged deity. They stood like prophets in the wilderness and pronounced woe upon all hypocrites.
Moreover, both Christ and Buddha were profoundly ethical in their teaching. They found that humanity was not only rotten with insincerity, it was also deceiving itself with the vain delusion that moral integrity and ethical nobility can be bartered for a multitudinous ceremonial. Men have always been prone to exalt ritual in proportion as they have neglected the eternal demands of conscience and the ethical foundation of character. The myriad-tongued ceremonial of the Brahmans of twenty-five centuries ago was the old evasion of righteousness in human life. Gautama saw this, and his noble soul rebelled against a faith which proclaimed that salvation was a thing of outward religious forms and not of the heart within.
"To cease from all sin,
To get virtue,
To cleanse our own heart,
This is the religion of the Buddhas."
These were the words with which he enunciated his new principles and carried forward his campaign of reaction against the faith of his fathers. Nothing less than, or apart from, purity of the soul within satisfied his requirement.
Indeed, he exalted so much the more highly this banner of heart purity and holiness, the less he had to say of the spiritual claims upon the soul. He had tried elaborate ceremonial and had found it wanting; he had practised the most severe religious austerities, but they had availed him little. In the quiet light which had dawned upon him under the sacred Boh tree he found that nothing wrought so mightily and beneficently as Dharma, or righteousness.
"The real treasure is that laid by man or woman,
Through charity or piety, temperance and self-control.