BUDDHISM IN RELATION TO CHRISTIANITY.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1166, 17 April 1884, Page 3

BUDDHISM IN RELATION TO CHRISTIANITY.

At the last large meetiDg held in February, by. the Victoria (Philosophical) Institute, 7, Adelphi Terrace, London, a paper was read by the Rev. R. C. Collins, M.A., on Buddhism in relation to Christianity. Referring to the parallels between the persons and characters of Buddha and Jesus Christ, he said :—Take, as a prominent instance the birth stories. I need not here give details, which are to be found in any modern work on Buddhism. The supposed miraculous conception ; the bringing down of Buddha from the Tusita heaven; the DeVas acknowledging his supremacy ; the presentation in the Temple, when the images of Indra and other gods threw themselves at his feet ; the temptation by Mara—which legends are embellished by the modern writer 1 have already quoted, under such phrases as * Conceived by the Holy Ghost,' ' Born of the Virgin Maya, 1 'Song of the heavenly host,' 'Presentation in the Temple and temptation in the wilderness,' —none of these is found in the early Pali texts. The simple story of ancient Buddhism is that an ascetic, whose family name wai Gautama, preached a new doctrine of human suffering, and a new way of deliverance from it. There is no thought in the early Buddhism, of which we read in the Pali texts, of deliverance at the bands of a god ; but the man Gautama Buddha stands alone in his striving after the true emancipation from sorrow and ignorance. The accounts of his descending from heaven, and being conceived in the world of men, when a preternatural light shone over the worlds, the blind received sight, the dumb sang, the lame danced, the sick were cured, together with all embellishments, are certainly added by later hands ; and if here we recognise some rather remarkable likenesses in thought or expression to things familiar to us in our Bibles we need not be astonished, when we reflect how great I must have been the influence, as I have before hinted, of the Christian story in i India in he early centuries of the Christian era, and, perhaps, long subsequently, This is a point which has been much overlooked, but it is abundantly evident from, among other proofs, the story of the god Krishna, which is a manifest parody of the history of Christ, The Bhagavat-Gita, a theosophical poem put into the mouth of Krishna, is something unique among the productions of the East, containing many gems of what we should call Christian truth wrested from their proper setting, to adorn this creation of the Brahman poet, and indicating as plainly their origin as do the stories of his life in the Maha-Bharata ; so that it has not unreasonably been concluded that the story of Krishna was inserted in the Maha-Bharata to furnish a divine sanction to the Bhagavat-Gita. If, then, as there is the strongest reason to be ieve, the Christian story, somewhere between the first and tenth oenturies of the Christian era, forced itself into

the great Hindu epic, and was at the foundation of the most remarkable poem thai over saw the light in India, can we bo surprised if we find similarly borrowed and imitated wonders in the later Buddhist stories also 1 A discussion ensued, in which Mr Hormuzd Kassam, Professor Leitner, from Lahore, Mr Coles, an earnest student of Ihe question during 25 years' residence in Ceylon, Professor Rhys Davids, and others took part, all agreeing in and confirming the statements of Mr Collins's paper. Dr Leitner brought a large number of photographs of early Indian and Tartar sculptures, showing the first introduction of the Christian story into those monuments between about the second and tenth centuries, and he pointed out the value of such additional confirmation of Mr Collins's statements. Several Home and Colonial applications to join the Institute as guinea subscribers wore received, the object of the Institute being to investigate all philosophical and scientific questions, especially any said to militate against the truth of the Bible.