Let me insert here a wonderful coincidence. At the end of the seventh and beginning of the eighth centuries of our era there lived in the monastery of Marsaba, that wonderful laura in the wilderness of Judæa, a monk of great piety and learning, St. John of Damascus, the greatest ecclesiastical writer of his age, and so eloquent a preacher that, like another John, the famous Patriarch of Constantinople, he was known as Chrysostom, the golden-mouthed, or Chrysorrhoas, gold-flowing. What, it will be asked, has this Syrian monk to do with Prince Siddartha and the four drives? Listen! Amongst the many books which St. John of Damascus wrote, or is supposed to have written, is the story of Barlaam and Josaphat. St. John said that he received it from travellers coming from India, and so firmly did he believe in its truth, that at the end of the story he appealed to the two saints for their intercession on his behalf. Max Müller sums up the tale as follows: “A king in India, an enemy and persecutor of the Christians, has an only son. The astrologers have predicted that he will embrace the new doctrine. His father, therefore, tries by all means to keep him ignorant of the miseries of the world, and to create in him a taste for pleasure and enjoyment. A Christian hermit, however, gains access to this prince, and instructs him in the doctrines of the Christian religion. The young prince is not only baptized, but resolves to give up all his earthly riches; and, after having converted his own father and many of his subjects, he follows his teacher into the desert.”[2] But that is not all. In the story of Josaphat, as told by St. John, we have also the tale of the drives—with this distinction: Whereas the Buddhist canon, the Lalita Vistara, represents Buddha as seeing on three successive drives, first an old, then a sick, and at last a dying man, St. John makes Josaphat meet two men on his first drive, one maimed, the other blind, and an old man who is nearly dying on the second drive. That is but a slight difference which would be accounted for by oral tradition. The coincidence is striking, and has been pointed out independently by English, French and German scholars; and, as Max Müller says, it is “as clear as daylight” that “Joannes Damascenus took the principal character of his religious novel from the Lalita Vistara.” The first European scholar to notice this was M. Laboulaye.