The personality of the Buddha invites comparison with the founders of the other world-religions, Christ and Mohammed.  We are tempted to ask too if there is any resemblance between him and Confucius, a contemporary Asiatic whose influence has been equally lasting, but here there is little common ground.  For Confucius’s interest was mainly in social and ethical problems, not in religion.  He laid stress on those ties of kinship and society, respecting which the Indian monk (like Christ) sometimes spoke harshly, although there is a strong likeness between the moral code of the Buddhist layman and Confucianism:  he was full of humility and respect for antiquity, whereas Gotama had a good share of that self-confidence which is necessary for all who propound to the world a new religion.[396]

But with Mohammed comparison, or rather contrast, is easier.  Both were seekers after truth:  both found what they believed to be the truth only when of mature years, Gotama when about thirty-six, Mohammed when forty or more:  both lived to be elderly men and possessed great authority.  But there the analogy ends.  Perhaps no single human being has had so great an effect on the world as Mohammed.  His achievements are personal and, had he never lived, it is not clear that the circumstances of the age would have caused some one else to play approximately the same part.  He more than Caesar or Alexander was individually the author of a movement which transformed part of three continents.  No one else has been able to fuse the two noble instincts of religion and empire in so perfect a manner, perfect because the two do not conflict or jar, as do the teachings of Christ and the pretensions of his Church to temporal power.  But it is precisely this fusion of religion and politics which disqualifies Islam as a universal religion and prevents it from satisfying the intellectual and spiritual wants of that part of humanity which is most intellectual and most spiritual.  Law and religion are inextricably mixed in it and a Moslim, more than the most superstitious of Buddhists or Christians, is bound by a vast number of ties and observances which have nothing to do with religion.  It is in avoiding these trammels that the superior religious instinct of Gotama shows itself.  He was aided in this by the temper of his times.  Though he was of the warrior caste and naturally brought into association with princes, he was not on that account tempted to play a part in politics, for to the Hindus, then as now, renunciation of the world was indispensable for serious religion and there is no instance of a teacher obtaining a hearing among them without such renunciation as a preliminary.  According to Indian popular ideas a genius might become either an Emperor or a Buddha but not like Mohammed a mixture of the two.  But the danger which beset Gotama, and which he consistently and consciously avoided, though Mohammed could not, was to give authoritative decisions on unessential points as to both doctrine and practice.