P. [121], line 22.—Born in a cave.
“Justin Martyr the Apologist, who, from his birth at Shechem, was familiar with Palestine, and who lived less than a century after the time of our Lord, places the scene of the nativity in a cave. This is, indeed, the ancient and constant tradition both of the Eastern and the Western Churches, and it is one of the few to which, though unrecorded in Gospel history, we may attach a reasonable probability” (see p. 20 of the cheap edition [1906] of Farrar’s Life of Christ). The grotto of the manger in the Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem is certainly a cave. Embedded in the rock is a much-kissed silver star bearing the inscription: “Hic de Virgine Maria Jesus Christus natus est.”
P. [122], line 6.—Krishna was slain.
The Vishnu Purâna speaks of his being shot in the foot with an arrow. Other accounts state that he was suspended on a tree. “On raconte fort diversement la mort de Crishna. Une tradition remarquable et avérée le fait périr sur un bois fatal (un arbre), ou il fut cloué d’un coup de flèche” (quoted from Mons. Guigniaut’s Religion de l’Antiquité, by Higgins; Anacalypsis, vol. i., p. 144). In the accounts given in the Mahâbhârata, Vishnu Purâna, and Bhagavat Purâna, the slaying is unintentional, but predestined. There appears to have been a crucifixion myth in ancient India; but Godfrey Higgins’ assumption that Krishna was crucified rests mainly on an oversight of the archæologist Moor (see J. M. Robertson’s Christianity and Mythology, pp. 294–9).
P. [123], lines 24–5.—Almost every important episode of the life of Christ.
“With the remarkable exception of the death of Jesus on the cross and of the doctrine of atonement by vicarious suffering, which is absolutely excluded by Buddhism, the most ancient of the Buddhistic records known to us contain statements about the life and the doctrines of Gautama Buddha which correspond in a remarkable manner, and impossibly by mere chance, with the traditions recorded in the Gospels about the life and doctrine of Jesus Christ” (quoted from p. 50 of Bunsen’s Angel Messiah).
P. [124], line 1.—Buddha was miraculously born.
Maya dreams that she is carried by archangels to heaven, and that there the future Buddha enters her right side in the form of a superb white elephant. Rhys Davids relates this legend on p. 183 of his Buddhism, and in a footnote he says: “Csoma Korösi refers in a distant way to a belief of the later Mongol Buddhists that Maya was a virgin (As. Res. xx. 299); but this has not been confirmed. St. Jerome says (Adversus Jovin., bk. 1): ‘It is handed down as a tradition among the Gymnosophists of India that Buddha, the founder of their system, was brought forth by a virgin from her side.’” In Samuel Beal’s Romantic History of Buddha (from the Chinese version) we read of Buddha’s miraculous birth, and that there is ground to assume the prevalence of this belief for centuries before Christ. Bunsen, again (p. x. of his Angel-Messiah), speaks of the “Virgin Maya, on whom, according to Chinese tradition, the Holy Ghost had descended”; and elsewhere (e.g., pp. 10 and 25) he adopts this version of the legend. Dr. Knowling, in his apologetic work, Our Lord’s Virgin Birth and the Criticism of Today, pp. 53–4, lays stress upon the grotesqueness of the idea that a man should enter his mother’s womb in the form of a white elephant. But, as Dr. Rhys Davids explains (p. 184 of Buddhism), there is nothing bizarre when the origin of the poetical figure has been ascertained. The belief was borrowed from the older sun-worship, “the white elephant, like the white horse [cf. [Rev. vi. 2] and [xix. 11, 14]], being an emblem of the sun, the universal monarch of the sky.”
P. [126], lines 1–2.—He was very early regarded as omniscient and absolutely sinless.
Dr. Rhys Davids’s remarks on the early growth of myths concerning Buddha, coming as they do from a champion of the Christian cause, are full of significance for anyone who permits himself to think and who keeps an open mind. He says (p. 182 of Buddhism): “The belief soon sprang up that he could not have been, that he was not, born as ordinary men are; that he had no earthly father; that he descended of his own accord into his mother’s womb from his throne in heaven; and that he gave unmistakeable signs, immediately after his birth, of his high character and of his future greatness.”