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even as we are one. I in them and Thou in Me, that they 
may be made perfect in one,’ John xvii. 22, 23. Wherein do 
these teachings of Brahminism and the Christian Scriptures 
differ except in the name God in place of Brahma? Is it 
proper to say such teachings have ‘no ethical quality’ ? 
3. What is the essential difference between the Brahminic 
idea ‘ swallowed up in Brahma,’ as Dr. Fairbairn expresses it, 
and the Buddhistic idea of ‘escape from the wheel of being to 
find quiet and unconscious repose in Nirvana’? And what 
the essential difference between both these and the Christian 
doctrine of the believer’s absolute oneness with God ? 
4, Did Nirvana, in the mind and teaching of Buddha, 
mean ‘escape from being,—absolute annihilation ? Did it 
not rather mean, escape from human passions and elements 
which involve evil, sorrow, and suffering ? 
5. Did Buddha teach blank Atheism? Our lecturer is 
made to say: ‘Given a universe, with evil, but without God, 
and pessimism is the most rational philosophy.’ If Buddhism 
teaches absolute atheism, then why the thousands of Buddhist 
temples for worship, and the daily and hourly prayers of 
Buddhists from the days of Sakyamuni to the present time? 
To whom do they pray ? 
Will’ some of our philosophers, so conversant with the 
inherent elements, motives, and forces of ancient and Oriental 
religions, give us in their next lectures a little more distinct 
and definite utterances on these and other similar points which 
are ever cropping up in the study of comparative religions?” 
ReMARKS upon the Foregoing by the Rev. R. Collins, M.A. (late Principal 
of Cottayam College) :— 
‘* Comparative religion is pre-eminently an historical study ; and the further 
we go back in actual history, the more distinctly do we see the fundamentals 
of religion, not developing, but unveiled. 
Buddhism is, I think, misunderstood in a great measure by Professor 
Fairbairn. It is difficult in the extreme to derive the exquisite morality of 
Buddhism from ‘ Blank Atheism.’ The fruits of ‘Blank Atheism’ would 
surely have had a different character. There is no valid evidence that the 
Buddhist Nirvana was originally ‘annihilation’ The ‘Samyutta Nikaya’ 
indicates the exact contrary. The morality of Baddha was already in the 
world. He revived the ethical aspect of religion, which had dropped out of 
Brahminism, and he despised the rites of the Brahmans, because they had 
lost their meaning. Buddha was a ‘Koheleth’: and he might well have 
