The Buddha was the son of a king; Jesus, the Christ, was the son of a carpenter. The Buddha grew up in the midst of the splendors of a court; Jesus, the Christ, was reared in a despised city, in an humble home. Yet the aspect of the Buddha is that of a disciple, a learner, an inquirer; that of the Christ is that of a master, a teacher. The Buddha seems rather to be a subject, and the Christ the king. The Buddha approaches the solution of the great problems of sin, suffering and death from below. He walks as one in a maze, with uncertain steps; he tries experiments; he goes from one teacher to another. Finally, of a sudden, comes the answer to the problems with which he has been puzzled; he throws the spectre with which he has been grappling. The Christ approaches the great and grave questions, that have been puzzling the world, as one who _has_ the answers in his possession. He comes to teach, and not to learn; to settle, and not to disturb. There is no hesitating uncertainty about His words or steps as there is about the Buddha’s. In meeting temptation, the Buddha shows weakness, where the Christ shows strength. The Buddha’s life was long; the Christ’s was short. The Buddha gave, undoubtedly, many wholesome precepts; but there is an element of kindly, self-forgetting love about the Christ’s teachings that is absent from the Buddha’s. Indeed, this is the emphatic point of superiority, that the Buddha kept constantly before his disciples _their_ welfare; he taught how a man might deliver _himself_ from suffering. The Christ makes self-salvation but a part of His disciples’ work. The Buddha has next to nothing to say about God; the Christ has all to say about God. The Christ seeks to show how man’s life is attached to God at every point; he exhibits the true character of God, presenting a picture infinitely superior to that drawn by the hand of any of the founders of religions, or by the highest imaginations of the purest men. In brief, the Buddha’s life and teachings were unquestionably good, but the Christ’s unquestionably better. This will be more apparent as, in the following chapters, we study the working out of the Buddha’s teachings. We shall see how much and how little they benefited the race. Let the test of time be applied to the answers he brought to the puzzling problems of sin, suffering and sorrow, and see if they have wrought out the good for which the Buddha looked, hoped and prayed. We shall see a partial success and a partial failure, and see the undoubted necessity of giving the knowledge of the Gospel to the nations who have known nothing better than that which Buddha had to tell. CHAPTER XXVII. THE BUDDHIST BIBLE, THE “THREE BASKETS,” AND ITS TEACHINGS.