In the Gospels Christ teaches neither asceticism nor metempsychosis.  The absence of the former is remarkable:  he eats flesh and allows himself to be anointed:  he drinks wine, prescribes its use in religion and is credited with producing it miraculously when human cellars run short.  But he praises poverty and the poor:  the Sermon on the Mount and the instructions to the Seventy can be put in practice only by those who, like the members of a religious community, have severed all worldly ties and though the extirpation of desire is not in the Gospels held up as an end, the detachment, the freedom from care, lust and enmity prescribed by the law of the Buddha find their nearest counterpart in the lives of the Essenes and Therapeutae.  Though we have no record of Christ being brought into contact with these communities (for John the Baptist appears to have been a solitary and erratic preacher) it is probable that their ideals were known to him and influenced his own.  Their rule of life may have been a faint reflex of Indian monasticism.  But the debt to India must not be exaggerated:  much of the oriental element in the Essenes, such as their frequent purifications and their prayers uttered towards the sun, may be due to Persian influence.  They seem to have believed in the pre-existence of the soul and to have held that it was imprisoned in the body, but this hardly amounts to metempsychosis, and metempsychosis cannot be found in the New Testament.[1115] The old Jewish outlook, preserved by the Sadducees, appears not to have included a belief in any life after death, and the supplements to this materialistic view admitted by the Pharisees hardly amounted to the doctrine of the natural immortality of the soul but rather to a belief that the just would somehow acquire new bodies and live again.  Thus people were ready to accept John the Baptist as being Elias in a new form.  Perhaps these rather fragmentary ideas of the Jews are traceable to Egyptian and ultimately to Indian teaching about transmigration.  That belief is said to crop up occasionally in rabbinical writings but was given no place in orthodox Christianity.[1116]

With regard to the teaching of Christ then, the conclusion must be that it owes no direct debt to Indian, Egyptian, Persian or other oriental sources.  But inasmuch as he was in sympathy with the more spiritual elements of Judaism, largely borrowed during the Babylonian captivity, and with the unworldly and self-denying lives of the Essenes, the tone of his teaching is nearer to these newer and imported doctrines than to the old law of Israel.[1117]

Some striking parallels have been pointed out between the Gospels and Indian texts of such undoubted antiquity that if imitation is admitted, the Evangelists must have been the imitators.  Before considering these instances I invite the reader’s attention to two parallel passages from Shakespeare and the Indian poet Bhartrihari.  The latter is thus translated by Monier Williams:[1118]