Christianity and Buddhism: A Comparison and a Contrast

In studying a religion different from that acknowledged amongst ourselves there are two dangers that have to be avoided. Some persons who have been in the habit of regarding all other religions as absolutely false-as partaking only of darkness, and in no sense of light, and finding when they begin to study them that their conceptions have been wrong, run at once an opposite extreme; they use language in reference to the doctrines of these religions, and the Sacred Books in which the doctrines are enshrined, that is both exaggerated and misleading. So far from regarding their own religion as alone possessing light and truth, they now proclaim other religions to be as true as, or even more true than, that which they had been brought up to believe. For those who become enamoured of another religion become often strangely unjust towards their own-they not only under-estimate its worth, but they positively misrepresent its teaching. Both these tendencies are illustrated in the case of those who have written on Buddhism. By some Buddhism and its Sacred Books are exalted above Christianity and the Bible: to read their words one would suppose that in Buddhism was to be found unclouded light and spotless perfection; and that in the Books of that religion there was contained a store of wisdom, an exalted morality, a poetic beauty unparalleled in the records of any other creed.