RELIGIONS OF ANCIENT INDIA 479 



philosophy, and are even found here and there in Plato. Comparison 

 with Buddhism offers the best means of approaching and under- 

 standing these ideas. The earthly existence seems" to these Greeks, 

 as to Buddhists, to be shrouded in darkness. The soul has fallen 

 from its true home into "life without life," into an impermanent 

 world. As in Buddhism, suffering lasts indefinitely in the wander- 

 ings of the soul, in which it "exchanges life's painful paths one for 

 another." But like Buddha the wise man recognizes and points out 

 the "way to salvation." He teaches the art of freeing one's self 

 from bodily existence. Knowledge and philosophy lead the spirit 

 to the bliss that Plato extols. In a sudden vision the eternal one, 

 that ever is, beams upon him, and into union with him he enters 

 freed of all fetters, just as the blessed certainty of Nirvana illumined 

 the son of Sakya in the holy night: "Destroyed is the rebirth, 

 fulfilled the holy change and duty done; I shall not return to the 

 world again." 



The national differences between the two peoples are of course 

 clearly seen when one more closely examines these ideas. How 

 could it be otherwise? Yet after all, the harmony is wonderful 

 with which the voices of the Greek thinkers answer the yellow-robed 

 Indian monks. It reminds one almost of those correspondences that 

 we saw ethnology finds between the ideas of peoples most widely 

 separated. There lies the same haze of vague forebodings over both 

 these ideal worlds, the Grecian as well as the Indian. There is the 

 same longing for the cessation of motion, of becoming and change. 

 With it sounds of triumph are mingled : the proud consciousness of 

 one's own power to call a halt to that motion. And this implies that 

 we must never oppose to one another these moods as peculiarly 

 Indian or Christian. They are certainly not Indian alone. Allied 

 Indian and Grecian research teaches that they are the products of 

 forces that do not belong to simply one country. Accordingly the 

 necessary basis has now been given the science of religion for investi- 

 gating these forces; namely, how far do they agree with, and how 

 far do they differ from, those which have produced Christianity? 



Perhaps the differences wall first strike the eye. On the one hand, 

 in India and Greece, we have the wise man who, through his know- 

 ledge of the nature of the w r orld and the workings of the universal 

 law, rises above the suffering that it brings him; on the other hand, 

 in Christianity, the pious man who, though poor in spirit, clings to the 

 mercy of the all-loving God with childlike confidence. On the one 

 hand, the final goal as conceived by a mind accustomed to meta- 

 physical abstractions, as rest freed from all "becoming" in the 

 realms of " ideas " or those places 



Where there is no being, nothing firm, in the isle, the only 



