racter for his own great career and
bring about the selflessness which is essential to a Buddha. When once
he had attained enlightenment any idea of sacrifice, such as the
shepherd laying down his life for the sheep, had no meaning. It would be
simply the destruction of the more valuable for the less valuable. Even
the modern developments of Buddhism which represent the Buddha Amida as
a saviour do not contain the idea that he gives up his life for his
followers.

Gotama instituted a religious order and lived long enough to see it grow
out of infancy, but its organization was gradual and for a year or two
it was simply a band of disciples not more bound by rules than the
seventy whom Christ sent forth to preach. Would Christ, had he lived
longer, have created something analogous to the Buddhist _sangha_, a
community not conflicting with national and social institutions 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 thei