Century), stands upon the lotus in the attitude of a teacher. In contrast to the statue of Mi-rô-Kou it emphasises the human in Buddha and reminds us of the Protestant conception of Christ, which found its noblest representation in Thorwaldsen's famous

statue.

3. Sam-bô, or the Buddhistic trinity, again representing Roman Catholic taste, shows the three jewels, the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. The Dharma (in one sense the Christian logos, in another the Holy Ghost) being most appropriately represented by written words, nor is it impossible that its higher position may indicate a certain superiority over the Buddha and the Sangha. For the Buddha is the incarnation and the Sangha the continued proclamation of the Dharma.

4. Kouan-yin, a peculiar conception of Buddha (made of porcelain), represents Buddha in one of his female incarnations as the goddess of charity and motherly love. The resemblance to Roman Catholic representations of Mary, the mother of Christ, is obvious, and the coincidence loses none of its force when we consider that the mythological conception of Kouan-yin is radically different from that of Mary. Buddha is conceived not as the object of motherly love, not as the infant, but as Love itself. The statues on both sides of the chair are Hoang-tchen-saï, the disciple of Kouan-yin, and Loung-nou, the servant of Kouan-yin; the former in an attitude of worship, the latter holding in his hands a luminous pearl. The necklace of Kouan-yin contains an ornament in the shape of a cross of the Renaissance.

5. Kouan-on, the Buddha of Charity, of gilt wood (Twelfth Century), an art production of the Tendai sect, exhibits what appears to us a transition to the conception of Buddha in the form of Kouan-yin. Buddha's attitude and the grace of his appearance is almost womanly, and might serve as a statue of the Virgin.

6. The Devil as a Buddhistic monk, carved wood of the Seventeenth Century, finds many parallel productions on the pinnacles of Gothic cathedrals. There is little probability that the Japanese. artist who, with great ingenuity and humor, sculptured this admirable statue, ever heard of Rabelais, whose verse from Book IV,

chapter xxiv, has become an English proverb, which, according to Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, page 772, reads as follows:

The Devil was sick, the Devil a monk would be:

The Devil was well, the devil a monk was he."

There is not only an obvious similarity in the religious ideas and objects of devotion, but even in religious satire, which cannot be explained by imitation, but must have originated independently in Buddhism as in Christianity.

THE CONNEXIONS BETWEEN THE EAST AND WEST.

There is

The question whether Christianity and Buddhism have a common origin is perhaps less important than it appears, yet there attaches to it a peculiar interest because there is a numerically very strong section of Christians who would not allow that the noble ethical maxims of Jesus of Nazareth could have developed according to the laws of nature in the normal progress of evolution. certainly very little probability of a borrowing on the part of Buddhism as it is in all its essential features considerably older than Christianity. Buddha lived in the fifth century before Christ. The Buddhistic canon was settled at the time of the second council which took place about 250 B. C., and Ashoka's rock inscriptions which contain the gist of Buddha's doctrine and testify to its established existence date from the same period. This excludes at once the supposition that Buddhism is indebted to Christianity for its lofty morality and the purity of its ideals.

We must add that it remains not impossible (although not probable) that Buddhism, as it developed in its later phases in the North, has received from Christianity some modes of worship for which there would have been no place in the older Buddhism. Thus Prof. Samuel Beal believes that Christian ideas and forms of worship must have been imported into Northern India as early as 50 A.D. He considers it as highly probable that King Gondoforus of the Legenda Aurea is identical with Gondophares, the founder of the Scythian dynasty in Seistan Vandahâr and Sindh, coins of whose reign are mentioned by General Cunningham. (Arch. Survey of

Ind., II, p. 59.) Professor Beal trusts that the old legend of St. Thomas's visit to India is confirmed; he does not consider, however, the possibility, which is not improbable, that the legend of St. Thomas may, like the St. Josaphat story, be a Christianised Buddhist legend. We waive the question and confine ourselves to stating that the evidences which Professor Beal introduces to prove the possibility of a Christian influence upon later Buddhism go still farther to establish the possibility of a Buddhistic influence upon Judea before the time of Christ's appearance. Professor Beal says (p. 133–134):

"The Parthian prince, Pacorus, was, as Josephus tells us, in possession of Syria and at Jerusalem. . . . Then again, the marriage of Chandragupta with a daughter of Seleucus, and the apparent knowledge possessed by the grandson of Chandragupta, the great Asoka, with the Greek King Antiochus, and his embassy to four other Greek kings,—all this shows that there must have been some connexion between India and the Western world, from the time of the establishment of Greek influence in the valley of the Oxus."

There were plenty of channels through which Buddhist doctrines could reach Palestine.

Speaking of the similarity between the Buddhist story of the wise judge and the account of Solomon's judgment, as told in the Book of Kings, Prof. Rhys Davids mentions the commercial relations that obtained in those early days between Judea and India. He says (Buddhist Birth Stories, pp. xlvi-xlvii):

'The land of Ophir was probably in India. The Hebrew names of the apes and peacocks said to have been brought thence by Solomon's coasting-vessels are merely corruptions of Indian names. . . . But any intercourse between Solomon's servants and the people of Ophir must, from the difference of language, have been of the most meagre extent; and we may safely conclude that it was not the means of the migration of our tale.

Though the intercourse by sea was not continued after Solomon's time, gold of Ophir, ivory, jade, and Eastern gems still found their way to the West; and it would be an interesting task for an Assyrian or Hebrew scholar to trace the evidence of this ancient overland route in other ways."

In order to prove the possibility of an exchange of thought between India and Judea, it is not even necessary to fall back upon these old commercial relations which are difficult to trace, for we know for sure that since Alexander's time the connexions between