le of the talents. Need we
suppose that there has been borrowing on either side? Only in a very
restricted sense, I think, if at all. The parable is taken from common
life, as the Indian text truly says. It occurred to some teacher,
perhaps to many teachers independently, that the spiritual life may be
represented as a matter of profit and loss and illustrated by the
conduct of those who employ their money profitably or not. The idea is
natural and probably far older than the Gospels, but the parable of
the talents is an original and detailed treatment of a metaphor which
may have been known to the theological schools of both India and
Palestine. The parable of the sower bears the same relation to the
much older Buddhist comparison of instruction to agriculture[1123] in
which different classes of hearers correspond to different classes of
fields.

I feel considerable hesitation about two other parallels. What
relation does the story of the girl who gives two copper coins to the
Sangha bear to the parable of the widow's mite? It occurs in
Asvaghosa's Sutralankara, but though he was a learned poet, it is
very unlikely that he had seen the Gospels, Although his poem ends
like a fairy tale, for the poor girl marries the king's son as the
reward of her piety, yet there is an extraordinary resemblance in the
moral and the detail of the _two_ mites. Can the origin be some
proverb which was current in many countries and worked up differently?

The other parallel is between Christ's meeting with the woman of
Samaria and a story in the Divyavadana[1124] telling how Ananda asked
an outcast maiden for water. Here the Indian work, which is probably
not earlier than the third century A.D., might well be the
borrower. Yet the incident is thoroughly Indian. The resemblance is
not in the conversation but in the fact that both in India and
Palestine water given by the impure is held to defile and that in both
countries spiritual teachers rise above such rules. Perhaps Europeans,
to whom such notions of defilement are unknown, exaggerate the
similarity of the narratives, because the similarity of customs on
which it depends seems remarkable.

There are, however, some incidents in the Gospels which bear so great
a likeness to earlier stories found in the Pitakas that the two
narratives can hardly be wholly independent. These are (_a_) the
testimony of Asita and Simeon to the future careers of the infant
Buddha and Christ: (_b_) the tem