OP CHRISTIANITY UPON OTHER RELIGIOUS SYSTEMS. 37 



North in the seventh, and possibly long before this ; it was the 

 topic of debate by educated Hindus in the sixteenth and seven- 

 teenth. It has helped to mould the Hindus' own most 

 intellectual sects ; and, either through the influence of Christian 

 or native teaching, or that of both, have been created, not only 

 the Northern Monotheistic Schools, but also the strict Uni- 

 tarianism of the later southern sects, whose Scriptures, for at 

 least some centuries, have inculcated the purest morality and 

 simplest Monotheistic creed in language of the most elevated 

 character." As an example he mentions the Sacred Kural of 

 Tiruvalluvar Narayana. 



Again, Sir N'arayan Chandarvarkar, a Justice of the High 

 Court and Chancellor of the Bombay University, says : " The 

 ideas which lie at the heart of the Gospel of Christ are slowly 

 but surely permeating every part of Hindu society and modify- 

 ing every phase of Hindu thought."* 



11.— MAE Ay Ana buddhism in china and 



JAPAN 



Though Buddhism originally rose in India, it has long since 

 died out of India proper, surviving in its Hinayana form only 

 in Ceylon. Its later phase of Mahayana Buddhism, beginning 

 in l^orthern India, reached China in early times, and thence 

 spread through Korea to Japan. Mahayanism, instead of being 

 an Atheistic philosophy, as Buddhism originally was, has 

 become a religion of many gods, with much ritual and not a 

 few doctrines very different from those of the Tipitakas, 

 though the original Buddhist philosophy still in great measure 

 underlies it. 



A recent writerf has asserted that Mahayanism may be justly 

 styled " New Testament Buddhism," and that, though it has not 

 borrowed from Christianity, it yet holds so many of the same 

 leading doctrines in common with the latter that it may be said 

 to be " an Asiatic form of the same Gospel of our Lord and 

 Saviour Jesus Christ," having developed them independently. 

 This view has been refuted in the Journal of the Transactions of 

 the Victoria Institute.'l The fortuitous resemblances in a few 

 outward matters are slight, and seem to owe little or nothing to 

 the influence of even ISTestorian Christianity, while in doctrine 

 the differences are immense. Yet Mahayanism in China has 



C.M.S. Review, December, 1914, p. 732. 

 t Dr. Timothy Richard, The iV.T. Higher Buddhism, 

 I Vol. xlvii, pp. 253 sqq. 



