476 BRAHMANISM AND BUDDHISM 



pleasure, take in them the interest of the collector in a rare find. 

 The historian, however, who seeks for the essential in things, will 

 surely not feel so enthusiastic. Even if any of the New Testament 

 narratives should really show evidences of Buddhistic influence, 

 although I doubt it very much personally, the picture of Christianity 

 would probably not be affected in the very slightest degree. We 

 are aware that there was great mingling of religious elements of 

 most varied origin in the last centuries before and the first cen- 

 turies after Christ, Grecian, Egyptian, Jewish, Babylonian, and 

 Persian. India was not separated from these movements by impass- 

 able barriers; still it was so remote that it could have had only a 

 minor share in them. 



We have now reviewed all the prehistoric as well as historic 

 relations. Have we, however, really exhausted thereby all that the 

 study of Indian religions has to offer to the whole science? We have 

 found the results obtained with regard to the belief of the Indo- 

 Europeans both few and unsafe, the extent of the Indo-Iranian 

 relationship narrowly restricted. We have found ethnology more 

 often our creditor than our debtor. Furthermore, the remoteness of 

 the civilizations of Central Asia and the farthest East that were 

 influenced by India and the insignificance of the religious exchange 

 with the West, does all this form an adequate basis for determining 

 the importance that the study of the religions of India has for under- 

 standing the world in which we live ? Certainly not. Whether the 

 study of Buddhism, for example, possesses a universal significance 

 over and above its own special one, cannot depend upon whether 

 a few stories from the great wealth of Buddhistic legends may have 

 found their way into Christian literature. We are not dealing here 

 with mere chance, external correspondences, but with inner relations. 



Here and there we find analogous and yet different forces working 

 on a similar yet different soil. These produce analogous yet different 

 forms. We shall certainly refrain from speaking as if a fixed law, in 

 the full sense of the term, were conceivable, or as if history were 

 simply a collection of forms that naturally fit into a symmetrical 

 system already discovered or yet to be discovered. Nevertheless 

 the substantial identity that I have already mentioned, that we 

 find in the lowest forms of civilization of which ethnology teaches, 

 can certainly not be absolutely lost in the higher phases of history, in 

 such differentiations as progress produces among the more highly 

 organized, less inert forms. The identity of the former case becomes 

 here a certain though often very limited parallelism. Parallelism, 

 however, means neither more nor less than law and order. And 



