The character of Pythagoras’s teaching and its relation to Egypt have been much discussed and the name of the master was clearly extended by later (and perhaps also by early) disciples to doctrines which he never held.  But it seems indisputable that there were widely spread both in Greece and Italy societies called Pythagorean or Orphic which inculcated a common rule of life and believed in metempsychosis.  The rule of life did not as a rule amount to asceticism in the Indian sense, which was most uncongenial to Hellenic ideas, but it comprised great self-restraint.  The belief in metempsychosis finds remarkably clear expression:  we hear in the Orphic fragments of the circle of birth and of escape from it, language strikingly parallel to many Indian utterances and strikingly unlike the usual turns of Greek speech and thought.  Thus the soul is addressed as “Hail thou who hast suffered the suffering” and is made to declare “I have flown out of the sorrowful weary wheel."[1111] I see no reason for discrediting the story that Pythagoras visited Egypt.[1112] He is said to have been a Samian and during his life (c. 500 B.C.) Samos had a special connection with Egypt, for Polycrates was the ally of Amasis and assisted him with troops.  The date, if somewhat early, is not far removed from the time when metempsychosis became part of Egyptian religion.  The general opinion of antiquity connected the Orphic doctrines with Thrace but so little is known of the Thracians and their origin that this connection does not carry us much further.  They appear, however, to have had relations with Asia Minor and that region must have been in touch with India.[1113] But Orphism was also connected with Crete, and Cretan civilization had oriental affinities.[1114]

The point of greatest interest naturally is to determine what were the religious influences among which Christ grew up.  Whatever they may have been, his originality is not called in question.  Mohammed was an enquirer:  in estimating his work we have often to ask what he had heard about Christianity and Judaism and how far he had understood it correctly.  But neither the Buddha nor Christ were enquirers in this sense:  they accepted the best thought of their time and country:  with a genius which transcends comparison and eludes definition they gave it an expression which has become immortal.  Neither the substance nor the form of their teaching can reasonably be regarded as identical, for the Buddha did not treat of God or the divine government of the world, whereas Christ’s chief thesis is that God loves the world and that therefore man should love God and his fellow men.  But though their basic principles differ, the two doctrines agree in maintaining that happiness is obtainable not by pleasure or success or philosophy or rites but by an unselfish life, culminating in the state called Nirvana or the kingdom of heaven.  “The kingdom of heaven is within you.”