Edmunds, Albert J.

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BUDDHIST AND CHRISTIAN GOSPELS.WORK DONE IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION BY ALBERT J. EDMUNDS.MR. Albert J. Edmunds of Philadelphia, who has contributedfrequently to the columns of The Open Court on the paral-lelism between the Buddhist and Christian Gospels, published in 1904the second edition of a pamphlet in wdiich he brings out a generalsynopsis of his labors. In the Preface he expresses his impatiencewith the publishers on account of their reluctance in bringing outhis lucubrations, and he adds thereto the hearty endorsement of hiswork by Prof. T. W. Rhys-Davids of London. We wish to statehere that we deem the results of Mr. Edmunds's investigations im-portant in a high degree and think that he is especially fitted forhis task ; because, on the one hand, he is a Christian and an accom-plished New Testament scholar, and, on the other hand, he sym-pathizes strongly with Buddhist doctrines. There is perhaps noone in the world so well acquainted with the sources of both re-ligions as he. If any one can with approximate certainty pointout the date of a Pali text, it is Mr. Edmunds, and few indeed are thescholars that are posted on the subject as well as he is. He is per-fectly familiar with the maturest results of New Testament criticism,and in the province of Pali scriptures he is himself one of the lead-ing higher critics.^ ^ ^From this pamphlet we select for publication some of the salientpoints which may serve as samples of Mr. Edmunds's work.^^ Buddhist and Christian Gospels. Now first compared from the originals.Being Gospel parallels from Pali texts, reprinted with additions by Albert J.Edmunds, Honorary Member and American Representative of the Inter-national Buddhist Society of Rangiin, Translator of the Dhammapada, "TheBuddhist Genesis," etc.. Member of the Oriental Society of Philadelphia. Sec-ond edition with a notice by T. W. Rhys-Davids. Philadelphia : Sold by theAuthor, 3231 Sansom St., and by Maurice Brix, 129 South Fifteenth St.Postal Orders payable at Middle City Station, Philadelphia. 1904. Price,25 cents ; Cloth, 50 cents.BUDDHIST AND CHRISTIAN GOSPELS. 539Some parallels between the Buddhist and Christian Gospels arevery remarkable but perhaps natural. So for instance : Christ iscalled "the Lion that is of the tribe of Judah," (Rev. v. 5) andBuddha is called "the lion of the tribe of Shakya" or briefly "Shakya-simha." We read in the NiDucrical Collection, v. 99:"Lion, O monks : this is the appellation of the Tathagato, theHoly One, the fully Enlightened One. Because, monks, when theTathagato proclaims the Doctrine to a company he does so with alion-voice. If he proclaim it unto monks or nuns, he proclaims itcomprehensively, with nothing omitted ; and likewise unto lay-dis-ciples, whether men or women. And if, monks, the Tathagato pro-claim the Doctrine to the common people even, who merely care forfood and maintenance and wealth, he proclaims it comprehensively.with naught omitted. What is the reason? The Tathagato, monks,is weighty in religion, an authority in religion."The literal agreement of a very unique phrase is extraordinaryand will go far to prove that there must have been a connection ofsome kind. We read in John xii. 34: "The multitude thereforeanswered him. We have heard out of the law, that Christ abidethforever." If we consider that the Greek New Testament texts arewritten without accents, the verb "abideth"^ might as well be thefuture and could in that case be translated "will abide" or "shallabide." The term "forever"- is an incorrect rendering. It meansin Greek "for the aeon," and the word "seon" corresponds exactlyto the Buddhist term kappa or in Sanskrit kalpa.Mr. Edmunds quotes passages from Enunciations vi. i, andLong Collection, Dialogue 16 {Book of the Great Decease. Trans-lated in Sacred Books of the East, Vol. XI. p. 40.) and translatesas follows:"Anando, any one who has practised the four principles ofpsychical power—developed them, made them active and practical,pursued them, accumulated and striven to the height thereof—can,if he so should wish, remain [on earth] for the reon or the rest ofthe aeon."Now, Anando, the Tathagato has practised and perfectedthese; and if he so should wish, the Tathagato could remain [onearth] for the seon or the rest of the seon."Mr. Edmunds makes the following comments on the passage:"As our text occurs also in the Sanskrit of the Divyavadana(which has an independent transmission) its antiquity is certain.^ lievEi means "abideth," and fiEvel, "will abide.""^ Eiq rhv a'ttji'a.540 THE OPEN COURT.Moreover, the Book of the Great Decease and that of Enunciationsare two of the oldest in the PaH, Enunciations being also one of theNine Divisions of a lost arrangement of the Canon."The ascription of the saying in John to 'the multitude,' showsit to have been a current belief at the time of Christ. It is not aNew Testament doctrine, though the physical Second Coming hasbeen assimilated to it. Commentators have been at a loss to identifythe Old Testament passage ('out of the Law') which is supposedto be quoted. The Twentieth Century Neiv Testament proposes theAramaic version of Isaiah ix. 7 as the source. The learned AugustWiinsch, in his work on the Gospels and the Talmud, says that thesource is unknown. Be that as it may, we have here a verbal Paliparallel:" '6 Xpiarbc fiEVEi f/f 701- a'liova: Tathagato kappa;;; ti^/lieyya.' "The beautiful passage in John xiv, which promises that Christwill manifest himself unto him who keeps his commands, can bematched by passages in the Buddhist text which bear a close re-semblance to it. We read in St. John xiv:"He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it isthat loveth me : and he that loveth me shall be loved of my Father,and I will love him, and will manifest myself unto him [i. e., appearbefore him.]"Mr. Edmunds quotes the following text from the Logia Book,92 (Partly translated into French by the translator of Minayeff:Recherches sur le Bonddhlsme: Paris, 1894, p. 218) :"O monks, even if a monk should gather up the folds of hisrobe and follow behind me, treading in my footsteps, yet if he becovetous, on lusts intent, bad-hearted, corrupt in his mind's aspira-tion, heedless, mindless, ill-conducted, with heart confused and un-ripe faculties, then is he far from me, and I from him."And why? Because, O monks, that monk sees not the Doc-trine ; and he who sees not the Doctrine sees not me."But if that monk should dwell an hundred leagues away, Omonks, and be not covetous, nor intent on lusts, not bad-hearted norcorrupt in his mind's aspiration, but heedful, mindful, well-con-ducted, with concentrated heart and faculties restrained, then is henear to me, and I to him."And why ? Because, O monks, that monk sees the Doctrine;and he who sees the Doctrine sees me.[The word "Doctrine" is the ubiquitous Dhaninio, SanskritDJiarnia; and can be equally translated "truth" or "religion."]BUDDHIST AND CHRISTIAN GOSPELS. 541"collection of SUTTAS, STANZAS II39-II44.(Translated by Fausboll : S. B. E., X, part 2, p. 212.)"From Him I am never absent,O Brahmin, for a moment—[Never absent] from Gotamo, the great of intellect,From Gotamo, in wisdom great.'"Twas he who taught me the DoctrineOf instantaneous, immediate peace,And destruction of Thirst,Whose likeness is nowhere."Him do I see in my mind, as with an eye.Vigilant, O Brahmin, night and day:Worshiping I pass the night;Therefore, I ween, am I never absent."Faith and joy, mind and memory.Bend me unto Gotamo's religion.What way soever goeth the Great Intellect,That way, and that only, am I bent."Of me who am aged and totteringThe body therefore fareth not thither.But in imagination I go ever;For, O Brahmin ! my mind is yoked with him."Shivering in the mire.From island unto island did I leap.Until I saw the fully Enlightened,The Flood-crossed, the Unsullied."Fausboll adds: "The commentary here states that Gotamo,knowing from afar the mental state of this monk and his companion,sent forth a golden light, and stood before them in apparition. Asimilar Christophany is related in the Introductory Story to JatakaNo. 4. But in Jataka No. 2, personal devotion to the Master isplaced on a lower level than solitary thought."The idea that Christ is the king of truth finds a literal parallelin Buddhist scriptures. We read in St. John xviii, 37:"Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesusanswered, Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end have I beenborn, and to this end am I come into the world, that I should bearwitness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth myvoice."In the Scla-Siitta. Buddha makes the same claim. He says:542 THE OPEN COURT."I am a King, O Selo!An incomparable King of religion;'By religion I set rolling a wheel,An irresistible wheel.* * *"What ought to be supremely known I know,What ought to be perfected I perfect.What ought to be renounced I renounce:Therefore, O Brahmin ! am I Buddha."Discipline thy doubt of me.Surrender thyself, O Brahmin !Hard to obtain is the appearingOf fully Enlightened Ones repeatedly."He who indeed is hard in the world to obtain.In manifestation repeatedly,That fully Enlightened One, O Brahmin, am I—Physician incomparable."Godlike, beyond measure,A crusher of the Devil's army,Having subjugated all enemies,I rejoice as one who hath nowhere a fear.* * *"Thou art Buddha, thou art the Master,Thou art the Sage who overcomest the Devil,Thou hast cast off all inclinations:And having crossed over thyself, hast ferried this[human] race across."As the disciples of Christ are not of the world, even as he isnot of the world (John xvii. i6), so Buddha desires his followersto live in the world without being soiled by it. He says {ClassifiedCollection XXII, 94) :"Monks, even as the blue lotus, a water-rose or a white lotus isborn in the water, grows up in the water, and stands lifted above it,by the water undefiled : even so, monks, does the Tathagato growup in the world, and abide in the mastery of the world, by the worldundefiled."We read in Mark ii. 21 :"No man seweth a piece of new cloth on an old garment, elsethe new piece that filled it up, taketh away from the old and the rentis made worse."The passage appears without any connection with the precedingstatements and is followed by a similar passage concerning the new^ Or Truth (as in John:) Dhaiiiino, which we generally translate "Doc-trine."BUDDHIST AND CHRISTIAN GOSPELS. 543wine in old bottles. Both the sentiments, concerning- the old clothand the old bottles, are contradictory to the sentiment of Jesusuttered in the Sermon on the Mount where he declares that "tillheaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass fromthe law." The clause "till all be fulfilled" is not contained in thebest codices, and is moreover contradictory to the other determina-tion of time "till heaven and earth pass away." But whatever Jesusmay have said, it is remarkable that we find a passage in the Bud-dhist scriptures which also speaks of the old cloth that has to becut away. We read [Middling Collection, Dialogue 22. Partlytranslated by Copleston : Buddhism, 1892, p. 30] :"Thus, O monks, is the Doctrine well taught by me—plain,patent, clear, and with the old cloth cut away. Seeing, O monks,that the Doctrine is thus well taught by me—plain, patent, clear, andwith the old cloth cut away,—all those who have merely faith andlove toward me are sure of Paradise hereafter."The following note on the grotesque in Buddhism deservesspecial attention:"The comparison of Buddha to an elephant excites in some asmile. But the elephant is just as gentle as the lamb and far moremajestic, yet we are not shocked by the Apocalyptic Lamb upon thethrone of the Godhead. I am told that certain items in the Bud-dhist scriptures are trivial or grotesque. Are the Gospels free fromthe like? Joseph's perplexity at the pregnancy of Mary, till a dreamassures him it is supernatural ; the food and raiment of the Baptist;the fantastic scenes of the Temptation ; the baptismal Dove ; thetransmuted water ; the extemporized creation of fishes ; the Devilswho know the Son of God ; the clay and the spittle ; the Gadareneswine (so humorously depicted by Carlyle) ; the coin in the fish'smouth ; the Matthjean parallel between Jonah's three nights andChrist's ; the rivers that flow from a believer's belly ; the blastedfig tree ; the Matthsean mistake about the two asses ; the anointedfeet wiped with a woman's hair; the whipping of the hucksters; theMatthsean apparitions of the corpses ; the hand in the resurrectedside ; the risen Lord eating broiled fish ; the vision of the sheet-fullof animals ; the Elect collected by a trumpet ; the adulterers castinto a bed: are not all these New Testament incidents and sawsgrotesque except to us who are powerfully psychologized by theChristian ideals? No philosopher will make objection for a momentto the Buddhist books on the score of the grotesque."544 THE OPEN COURT.Mr. Edmunds now proposes to bring out a more comprehensivework under the title Buddhist and Christian Gospels Noiv First Com-pared from the Origi)ials. The book will compare the texts of thetwo religions. It is to be edited by Mr. M. Anesaki, Professor ofReligious Science at the Imperial University of Japan, and he willadd many other parallels between Buddhist and Christian writingsderived from Chinese sources, printed in the original Chinese char-acters.The book is to appear in Japan and The Open Court PublishingCompany will act as its agent in the United States and Canada.Mr. Edmunds trusts that the parallels between Buddhist andChristian texts will, in many instances, throw new light on the textof the Gospels, and after having completed the manuscript, whichis now being set in Japan, he has discovered one more very impor-tant parallel which he publishes in a little pamphlet entitled. Canthe Pali Pitakas Aid Us in Fixing the Text of the Gospels? Mr.Edmunds answers this question in the affirmative, and he has pro-posed in his book three important parallels which will be a helpin determining the text of the Gospel. These are : First, The phrase,"An seon-lasting sin" (Mark iii. 29; Cullavaggo vii. 3). Second,The declaration that Christ remains on earth for an jeon (John xii.34; Enunciations vi. i, and Decease Book iii. 3). Third, Christ'sword "I have overcome the world" (John xvi. 33 ; Numerical Col-lection i. 15). Mr. Edmunds has discovered a fourth one which hasnot been incorporated into his forthcoming book, but which was soimportant to him that he was anxious not to have it overlooked.We will here recapitulate the contents of his pamphlet mostlyin his own words.When the Buddha was born, we are told Asito, the hermit, sawthe god"Sakko the leader and angels white-stoled,Seizing their robes, and praising exceedingly."He asks the angels why they rejoice, and they answer:"The Buddha-to-be,^ the best and matchless Jewel,Is born for weal and welfare in the world of men,^ This term, in Pali Bodhisatto, is the word whose Sanskrit form Bodhi-sattva, through the Arabic Yudasatf, has been transformed into the ChristianJosaphat. He (i. e. Buddha) is a saint of the Catholic Church (both Greekand Roman) and has a church at Palermo. See the Autobiography of AndrewD. White, who visited it in 1895 (Vol. II, p. 455- For a photograph of thesaint's statue on the altar and further explanations see The Open Court, Vol.XV, p. 284). The Buddhist-Christian romance of Barlaam and Joasaph,after being rendered into most of the languages of Christendom from Armeniato Iceland, was finally translated into Tagalog (Manila, 1712 and 1837).BUDDHIST AND CHRISTIAN GOSPELS. 545In the town of the Sakyas, in the region of Lumbini:Therefore are we joyful and exceeding glad."This passage agrees in some of its phraseology literally withthe message of the angels to the shepherds as we read in Luke:"And the angel said unto them, Be not afraid; for behold, I bring yougood tidings of great joy which shall be to all the people: for there is bornto you this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.And this is the sign unto you ; Ye shall find a babe wrapped in swaddlingclothes, and lying in a manger. And suddenly there was with the angel amultitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying. Glory to God in thehighest, and on earth peace, divine favor among men."The parallel is further carried out in the narrative. The hermit,like the shepherds, goes to pay his reverence to the newborn Saviour.Considering that, between the Greek of Luke and the Pali of theSutta Nipato, there lies a lost Aramaic version, many of the wordsin the two accounts are practically identical. The Pali words hita-sukhataya ("for blessing and happiness") are a conventional phrase,often recurring in the texts. They are here translated "weal andwelfare," for the sake of poetic effect, but they mean much thesame as the English phrase, "peace and prosperity." Now if Luke,or rather his Aramaic intermediary, did actually use the Pali poem,it is evident that (omitting jato, "born") we find a very good equiv-alent of the lineManiissaloke hitasukhataya jato,literally:"In the world of men for weal and welfare born,"in the line€7rt T^? y^s elprjvr] iv avOpwTTOi^ €v8oKLa.literally"Upon earth peace, among men good will."It is thrown into the form of a Hebrew parallelism, in whichpeace on earth and divine favor among men are interchangeableterms. But it is well known that the oldest manuscripts of the NewTestament are at variance here over the word "good will."- Someread the genitive,^ and then we must render:"among men of good will" (i. e., men of thedivine favor, i. e., the elect, as Alford says).This is the reading of the Vulgate and of the English and Amer-ican Revised Versions. It is because "good will" in the Septuagint^ evdonia.^ EvSoKiag.546 THE OPEN COURT.means so often the Divine good pleasure that the Revised Versionhas "men in whom he is well pleased." But the old King Jamesreading (following the textus receptus afterwards fixed by the Dutchprinters Elzevir) is borne out by the analogy of all Hebrew paral-lelisms. This is therefore a passage wherein the Pali Pitakas canprobably aid us in fixing the text of the New Testament.The same can be said of the Marcan phrase, "seon-lasting sin,"*which, as Dean Alford long since pointed out, was so unusual thatthe copyists altered it to "eternal judgment" (or damnation). Butthe idea was a Hindu one, and as Buddhism in the time of theapostles was the most powerful religion on the planet, and actuallysending missionaries into China, it is now coming to be admittedby scholars that it was not unknown in Palestine. As Van Eysinga,^in his recent work on the subject, has said, we know that Christiansborrowed stories of Buddhists from the third century onward, andthe same channels of intercourse were open in the first.Luke, the most learned of the Evangelists, was a physician ofAntioch (according to a second-century tradition^), and it was pre-cisely in the metropolitan centers Rome, Antioch, and Alexandria,that interchanges of religious ideas and the study of comparativetheology then flourished. The lost work of the Egyptian Asclepia-des, Theologoumena^ (i. e., what we should call Comparative Theol-ogy) must have been one out of many such. For further informa-tion about intercourse between Palestine and India we refer thereader to Van Eysinga and to Mr. Edmunds's forthcoming book.* aluvioi' afiapT7]fia.^ Indische EinMsse auf evangelische Erzdhlungen. Gottingen, 1904."The Muratorian Fragment. Rendel Harris says that the informationabout Luke probably rests upon the lost work of Papias.' Referred to by Suetonius, Aug., 94.

Buddhist and Christian Gospels. Work done in Comparative Religion.

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Buddhist and Christian Gospels. Work done in Comparative Religion.

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