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and study. How far that study embraced what might be the 

 tradition of the past we have no means of certainly knowing ; 

 but he is said to have been determined to be a " follower of 

 the Buddhas of bygone ages " ; and that may mean^ that 

 during his years of seclusion he had the means of canvassing 

 the teaching of some of the leaders of mankind, who had gone 

 before him. Thei'e is nothing divine in all this ; nor is any- 

 thing claimed for him beyond the actions of an earnest ascetic. 

 What there was of the divine in his mission was, according to 

 the Mahavagga, external to himself. It is remarkable that, 

 though Buddhism, now at least, is atheistic, yet the supreme 

 Brahma, called by the Buddhists Brahma Sahampati, is con- 

 stantly mentioned, even in the oldest texts, as influencing 

 Buddha ; and when he first felt enlightenment, Brahma 

 Sahampati is said in the Mahavagga to have encouraged him 

 in preaching his doctrine. May not this mean, that Buddha 

 in the first instance claimed divine authority for his mission ? 

 And what was his mission ? It was, in the main, to preach, 

 according to his lights, much as Savonarola did in Florence, 

 against the vices of the day. In all this there is nothing 

 but the earnest monk preaching purity of life as the way to 

 happiness now and hereafter. There is no thought in the 

 early Buddhism, of which we read in the Pali texts, of 

 deliverance at the hands of a god; but the man Gautama 

 Buddha stands alone in his striving after the true emanci- 

 pation 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 such embel- 

 lishments, 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 must have been the 

 influence, as I have before hinted, of the Christian story in 

 India in the 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-GUa, a theo- 

 sophical 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 



