The resemblances of the legendary lives of Christ and Buddha are surprising: so also are the resemblances of forms and ethics of the ancient Buddhists and the early Christians.
Mr. Arthur Lillie, in Buddha and Buddhism, makes the following quotation from M. Leon de Rosny:
The astonishing points of contact between the popular legend
of Buddha and that of Christ, the almost absolute similarity
of the moral lessons given to the world between these two
peerless teachers of the human race, the striking affinities
between the customs of the Buddhists and the Essenes, of whom
Christ must have been a disciple, suggest at once an Indian
origin to Primitive Christianity.
Mr. Lillie goes on to say that there was a sect of Essenes in Palestine fifty years B.C., and that fifty years after the death of Christ there existed in Palestine a similar sect, from whom Christianity was derived. Mr. Lillie says of these sects:
Each had two prominent rites: baptism, and what Tertullian
calls the "oblation of bread." Each had for officers, deacons,
presbyters, ephemerents. Each sect had monks, nuns, celibacy,
community of goods. Each interpreted the Old Testament in a
mystical way—so mystical, in fact, that it enabled each to
discover that the bloody sacrifice of Mosaism was forbidden,
not enjoined. The most minute likenesses have been pointed
out between these two sects by all Catholic writers from
Eusebius to the poet Racine... Was there any connection
between these two sects? It is difficult to conceive that
there can be two answers to such a question.
The resemblances between Buddhism and Christianity were accounted for by the Christian Fathers very simply. The Buddhists had been instructed by the Devil, and there was no more to be said. Later Christian scholars face the difficulty by declaring that the Buddhists copied from the Christians.
Reminded that Buddha lived five hundred years before Christ, and that the Buddhist religion was in its prime two hundred years before Christ, the Christian apologist replies that, for all that, the Buddhist Scriptures are of comparatively late date. Let us see how the matter stands.
The resemblances of the two religions are of two kinds. There is, first, the resemblance between the Christian life of Christ and the Indian life of Buddha; and there is, secondly, the resemblance between the moral teachings of Christ and Buddha.
Now, if the Indian Scriptures are of later date than the Gospels, it is just possible that the Buddhists may have copied incidents from the life of Christ.
But it is perfectly certain that the change of borrowing cannot be brought against Augustus Caesar, Plato, and the compilers of the mythologies of Egypt and Greece and Rome. And it is as certain that the Christians did borrow from the Jews as that the Jews borrowed from Babylon. But a little while ago all Christendom would have denied the indebtedness of Moses to King Sargon.