tinge must be late and
adventitious. If, on the other hand, they feel that the extent and
importance of the legendary element entitles it to consideration, they
minimize the historical kernel. But in India, reality and fancy, prosaic
fact and extravagant imagination are found not as successive stages in
the development of religious ideas, but simultaneously and side by side.
Keshub Chunder Sen was a Babu of liberal views who probably looked as
prosaic a product of the nineteenth century as any radical politician.
Yet his followers were said to regard him as a God, and whether this is
a correct statement or not, it is certain that he was credited with
superhuman power and received a homage which seemed even to Indians
excessive[739]. It is in the light of such incidents and such
temperaments that we should read the story of the Buddha. Could we be
transported to India in the days of his preaching, we should probably
see a figure very like the portrait given in the more sober parts of the
Pitakas, a teacher of great intelligence and personal charm, yet
distinctly human. But had we talked about him in the villages which lay
along his route, or even in the circle of his disciples, I think we
should have heard tales of how Devas visited him and how he was wont to
vanish and betake himself to some heaven. The Hindu attributes such
feats to a religious leader, as naturally as Europeans would ascribe to
him a magnetic personality and a flashing eye.

The Pitakas emphasize the omniscience and sinlessness of the Buddha but
contain no trace of the idea that he is God in the Christian or
Mahommedan sense. They are consistently non-theistic and it is only
later that Buddhas and Bodhisattvas become transformed into beings about
whom theistic language can be used. But in those parts of the Pitakas
which may be reasonably supposed to contain the ideas of the first
century after the Buddha's death, he is constantly represented as
instructing Devas and receiving their homage[740]. In the Khuddaka-patha
the spirits are invited to come and do him reverence. He is described as
the Chief of the World with all its gods[741], and is made to deny that
he is a man. If a Buddha cannot be called a Deva rather than a man, it
is only because he is higher than both. It is this train of thought
which leads later Buddhists[742] to call him Devatideva, or the Deva who
is above all other Devas, and thus make him ultimately a being
comparable with Siva or