Where Did Jesus Die? — Page 186
? 186 friend of publicans and sinners, transfigured on a mount, he descends into hell, ascends to heaven: in short with the single exception of Christ’s crucifixion, almost every char- acteristic incident in Christ’s life is also to be found nar- rated in the Buddhist traditions of the life of Sakyamuni Gautama Buddha. And yet, this Buddha lived and died 275 or even 543 years before Christ. As certain sceptics would make us believe, Christ went to India, during the eighteen years which intervened between his youth and manhood, and returned, thirty years old, to ape and reproduce the life and doings of Sakyamuni Buddha. Or are we to believe in Christ’s originality, driven to the miserable subterfuge of assuming as some Jesuit fathers do, that the devil, fore- knowing the several details of the Promised Messiah’s life, anticipated him and all the details of his life, by his own caricature in Sakyamuni Buddha? 1 Were the events then of Jesus’ life and his teachings truly bor- rowed from Buddhism, or was it coincidence as Dr. Eital says? Or did he go to India when he was young; or was it a work of the devil, as a certain Jesuit father says? Here is the true answer to this complicated question. Ahmad, the prophet of this age, writes in this connection in his work ‘Jesus in India’ [ Masih Hindustan Mein ]: Now it is worthwhile pondering over the question: Why were there so many resemblances between Buddha and 1. Eitel: Lectures on Buddhism, Third edition London, 1 884.