a very old man, knows his son, but instead of welcoming him at once as his heir puts him through a gradual discipline and explains the real position only on his deathbed.  These incidents have nothing in common with the parable related in the Gospel except that a son is lost and found, an event which occurs in a hundred oriental tales.  What is much more remarkable, though hardly a case of borrowing, is that in both versions the chief personage, that is Buddha or God, is likened to a father as he also is in the parable of the carriages.[1121]

One of the Jain scriptures called Uttaradyayana[1122] contains the following remarkable passage, “Three merchants set out on their travels each with his capital; one of them gained much, the second returned with his capital and the third merchant came home after having lost his capital; The parable is taken from common life; learn to apply it to the Law.  The capital is human life, the gain is heaven,” etc.  It is impossible to fix the date of this passage:  the Jain Canon in which it occurs was edited in 454 A.D. but the component parts of it are much older.  It clearly gives a rough sketch of the idea which is elaborated in the parable of the talents.  Need we suppose that there has been borrowing on either side?  Only in a very restricted sense, I think, if at all.  The parable is taken from common life, as the Indian text truly says.  It occurred to some teacher, perhaps to many teachers independently, that the spiritual life may be represented as a matter of profit and loss and illustrated by the conduct of those who employ their money profitably or not.  The idea is natural and probably far older than the Gospels, but the parable of the talents is an original and detailed treatment of a metaphor which may have been known to the theological schools of both India and Palestine.  The parable of the sower bears the same relation to the much older Buddhist comparison of instruction to agriculture[1123] in which different classes of hearers correspond to different classes of fields.

I feel considerable hesitation about two other parallels.  What relation does the story of the girl who gives two copper coins to the Sangha bear to the parable of the widow’s mite?  It occurs in Asvaghosa’s Sutralankara, but though he was a learned poet, it is very unlikely that he had seen the Gospels, Although his poem ends like a fairy tale, for the poor girl marries the king’s son as the reward of her piety, yet there is an extraordinary resemblance in the moral and the detail of the two mites.  Can the origin be some proverb which was current in many countries and worked up differently?

The other parallel is between Christ’s meeting with the woman of Samaria and a story in the Divyavadana[1124] telling how Ananda asked an outcast maiden for water.  Here the Indian work, which is probably not earlier than the third century A.D., might well be the borrower.  Yet the incident is thoroughly Indian.  The resemblance is not in the conversation but in the fact that both in India and Palestine water given by the impure is held to defile and that in both countries spiritual teachers rise above such rules.  Perhaps Europeans, to whom such notions of defilement are unknown, exaggerate the similarity of the narratives, because the similarity of customs on which it depends seems remarkable.