differ, the two doctrines agree in maintaining
that happiness is obtainable not by pleasure or success or philosophy
or rites but by an unselfish life, culminating in the state called
Nirvana or the kingdom of heaven. "The kingdom of heaven is within
you."

In the Gospels Christ teaches neither asceticism nor metempsychosis.
The absence of the former is remarkable: he eats flesh and allows
himself to be anointed: he drinks wine, prescribes its use in religion
and is credited with producing it miraculously when human cellars run
short. But he praises poverty and the poor: the Sermon on the Mount
and the instructions to the Seventy can be put in practice only by
those who, like the members of a religious community, have severed all
worldly ties and though the extirpation of desire is not in the
Gospels held up as an end, the detachment, the freedom from care, lust
and enmity prescribed by the law of the Buddha find their nearest
counterpart in the lives of the Essenes and Therapeutae. Though we have
no record of Christ being brought into contact with these communities
(for John the Baptist appears to have been a solitary and erratic
preacher) it is probable that their ideals were known to him and
influenced his own. Their rule of life may have been a faint reflex of
Indian monasticism. But the debt to India must not be exaggerated:
much of the oriental element in the Essenes, such as their frequent
purifications and their prayers uttered towards the sun, may be due to
Persian influence. They seem to have believed in the pre-existence of
the soul and to have held that it was imprisoned in the body, but this
hardly amounts to metempsychosis, and metempsychosis cannot be found
in the New Testament.[1115] The old Jewish outlook, preserved by the
Sadducees, appears not to have included a belief in any life after
death, and the supplements to this materialistic view admitted by the
Pharisees hardly amounted to the doctrine of the natural immortality
of the soul but rather to a belief that the just would somehow acquire
new bodies and live again. Thus people were ready to accept John the
Baptist as being Elias in a new form. Perhaps these rather fragmentary
ideas of the Jews are traceable to Egyptian and ultimately to Indian
teaching about transmigration. That belief is said to crop up
occasionally in rabbinical writings but was given no place in orthodox
Christianity.[1116]

With regard to the teaching of Christ then, the con