"Then thought the elder: 'Surely this lad, through the moderateness of his passions, must have gone away without announcing himself.' And he comforted her, and told her the whole story. The lay woman was pleased, and, lying prostrate, with her face in the direction in which her son had gone, she worshipped, saying: 'Methinks the Blessed One must have had in mind a body of priests like my son when he preached the course of conduct customary with the great saints, showing how to take delight in the cultivation of content.... This man ate for three months in the house of the mother who bore him, and never said, 'I am thy son, and thou art my mother.'... For such a one _mother and father_ are no hindrances, much less any other lay devotees." On one occasion, when I was privileged to attend an ordination service at Kandy, I was much struck with an incident which occurred at this time-old ceremony. At the conclusion of the service, when the melodious intoning of the celebrants had ceased to reverberate in the solemn ruins of the dimly-lighted aisle, the young initiate was placed at the bottom of the row of monks, who were seated, cross-legged, in the nave of the temple. During the service the lay spectators had been railed off at the entrance, which faced the shrine, beneath which the chief abbot presided. But, when the newly-ordained monk had assumed a sitting posture in the place assigned to him, the railing was removed, and his female relations--perhaps his "beloved one" among them--came forward and prostrated themselves at his feet. The initiate sat with downcast eyes, unmoved by the demonstration, recalling to mind one of those statues of Buddha in which the countenance is represented with that abstracted yet compassionate expression so characteristic of the Perfect One. Then also was brought to my recollection that saying of Jesus recorded in the Gospel when he turned towards his mother and exclaimed: "Woman, what have I to do with thee?" It may, I think, be indisputably affirmed that the deep insight of these great reformers into the problems of life, the profound impression they made upon a vain world, their sublimated ideas, their superhuman influences, their stainless lives--that all these proclaim them to have been veritable embodiments of the mystic Sophia and one with God. Separated only by the time appointed for their appearance in the world, they were both presentations of the same Logos, called in Buddhistic terminology "Bodhi" or Intelligence. Whether there was a difference between the quality of presentation in the cases of Jesus and Gotama, whether the one produced a more flamboyant light than the other, and in what respects and how the media differed, are questions that can only be answered by Christians and Buddhists themselves, according to the light that is in them. In the person of Jesus the human became divine. It was not a case of the conversion of the godhead into the flesh.