but independent of them?  The question is vain and to Europeans Christ’s sketch of the Christian life will appear more satisfactory than the finished portrait of the Bhikkhu.  But though his maxims are the perfect expression of courtesy and good feeling with an occasional spice of paradox, such as the command to love one’s enemies, yet the experience of nearly twenty centuries has shown that this morality is not for the citizens of the world.  The churches which give themselves his name preach with rare exceptions that soldiering, financing and the business of government—­things about which he cared as little as do the birds and the lilies of the field—­are the proper concern of Christian men and one wonders whether he would not, had his life been prolonged, have seen that many of his precepts, such as turning the other cheek and not resisting evil, are incompatible with ordinary institutions and have followed the example of the great Indian by founding a society in which they could be kept.  The monastic orders of the Roman and Eastern Churches show that such a need was felt.

There are many resemblances between the Gospels and the teaching of the Buddha but the bases of the two doctrines are different and, if the results are sometimes similar, this shows that the same destination can be reached by more than one road.  It is perhaps the privilege of genius to see the goal by intuition:  the road and the vehicle are subsidiary and may be varied to suit the minds of different nations.  Christ, being a Jew, took for his basis a refined form of the old Jewish theism.  He purged Jehovah of his jealousy and prejudices and made him a spirit of pure benevolence who behaves to men as a loving father and bids them behave to one another as loving brethren.  Such ideas lie outside the sphere of Gotama’s thought and he would probably have asked why on this hypothesis there is any evil in the world.  That is a question which the Gospels are chary of discussing but they seem to indicate that the disobedience and sinfulness of mankind are the root of evil.  A godly world would be a happy world.  But the Buddha would have said that though the world would be very much happier if all its inhabitants were moral and religious, yet the evils inherent in individual existence would still remain; it would still be impermanent and unsatisfactory.

Yet the Buddha and Christ are alike in points which are of considerable human interest, though they are not those emphasized by the Churches.  Neither appears to have had much taste for theology or metaphysics.  Christ ignored them:  the Buddha said categorically that such speculations are vain.  Indeed it is probably a general law in religions that the theological phase does not begin until the second generation, when the successors of the founder try to interpret and harmonize his words.  He himself sees clearly and says plainly what mankind ought to do.  Neither the Buddha, nor Christ, nor Mohammed cared for much