Jesus In India — Page 102
102 J e s u s i n I n d i a So although the two stories about hurting the feelings of a wife and a mother have a mutual resemblance, yet we cannot ascribe such stories as do not size up to the lowest level of moral conduct either to Jesus or to Gautama Buddha. If the Buddha loved not his wife, had he no pity on a poor woman and her suffering child either? It is so serious a lapse of moral conduct that I am shocked even to think of this story which is hundreds of years old and belongs to the dead past. Why at all should he have misbehaved like this? To be a bad man, it is enough to be callous towards one’s wife, unless she be immoral, disobedient, faithless, or hostile to her husband. We cannot, therefore, ascribe such offensive behaviour to the Buddha, which militates against his own teachings. All this shows that the story is false. In point of fact, ‘Rahulta’ means Jesus, whose other name is ‘Ruhullah’. The word ‘Ruhullah’ in Hebrew comes close to Rahulta, and ‘Rahula’, or, ‘Ruhullah’, has been described as a disciple of the Buddha because, as I have already stated, that Jesus came after the Buddha and brought a dispensation similar to that of the Buddha. That is why the followers of the Buddhist faith declared that the Buddha was the source of the teachings of Jesus, and that Jesus was one of his disciples. It should not be surprising if the Buddha, on the basis of revelation from God, should have declared Jesus to be his ‘son’. Another important piece of circumstantial evidence is that in the same book it is recorded that when the infant Rahulta was separated from his mother, a woman whose name was Magdaliyana, and who was a follower of the Buddha acted as the intermediary. It may be noted that the name Magdaliyana is in reality a corrupt form of the name Magdalena, a female