Words such as these, written in all probability before the birth of Christ, and applicable to the Nativity of S'akyamuni as it lives in Buddhist legend and belief, do not at all necessarily imply that the Nativity stories of the New Testament are merely faked-up fables, borrowed from an older cycle of fiction. Rather they show that when He was born, in the way in which His birth is recorded, He was fulfilling more than one prophecy. It is thus that it behoves a Divine Saviour to be born; that is the testimony of Isaiah, of Virgil, of the Buddhist Sutra, of many another great teacher that has appeared. It was part of the stock-in-trade (if I may so call it) of S'akyamuni; it was also a part of the stock-in-trade of Christ. If Christ's superhuman credentials had gone no further than the Nativity cycle, Christ would in no sense have differed from S'akyamuni. But Christ's claim of supernatural testimony went farther than S'akyamuni's. He claims our allegiance not merely because "He was conceived of the Holy Ghost, and born of the Virgin Mary," but more especially so because, having been crucified and slain, He rose again the third day from the dead. It is on the Resurrection that St. Paul bases Christ's claim to be the Son of God; it is this that makes Him unique in religious history. This places Christ at the head of all things in the religious world; its absence puts S'akyamuni into his proper place, a place in which he may yet claim the ungrudging respect of Christian people. It constitutes him a great witness and forerunner of Christ, and no Japanese can be offended at having him placed in such a seemingly humble position, for it is the place

which they themselves assign to him when they say, with their own poet, that the sole reason for S'akyamuni's appearance in the world was that he might point men to Amitabha.

Footnotes

^85:1 E.g. those at Amaravati, Ajanta, Sanchi, Barhut, Gaya, Nalanda, etc. For a convenient summary reviewing all that has been written on the subject, see Grunwedel, "Buddhistische Kunst in Indien" (Museum fur Volkerkunde, Berlin). Also Rhys Davids' "Buddhist India."

^86:1 See, e.g., "Buddhist and Christian Gospels," by A. J. Edmunds. I have used the Tokyo (1905) edition with notes by M. Anesaki.

^86:2 Edmunds and Anesaki, l.c., p. 2. See above, <page 42>.

^86:3 Ibid., p. 3. The writers also refer to Ferguson's "History of Indian and Eastern Architecture" (London, 1876), p. 5, and to Cunningham, "The Stupa of Barhut."

^86:4 I.e. The Five Nikayas, or, as they are termed in the , the Five Agamas. Professor Anesaki has given the Asiatic Society of Japan an exhaustive comparative study of the Pali Nikayas and Sanskrit Agamas.