Troubled as was the life of Christ, it contains no struggle of this sort.  As a youth he grew up in a poor family where the disenchantment of satiety was unknown:  his genius first found expression in sermons delivered in the synagogue—­the ordinary routine of Jewish ritual:  his appearance as a public teacher and his ultimate conviction that he was the Messiah were a natural enlargement of his sphere, not a change of method:  the temptation, though it offers analogies to Gotama’s mental struggle and particularly to the legends about Mara, was not an internal revolution in which old beliefs were seen to be false and new knowledge arose from their ashes.  So far as we know, his inner life was continuous and undisturbed, and its final expression is emotional rather than intellectual.  He gives no explanations and leaves no feeling that they are necessary.  He is free in his use of metaphor and chary of definition.  The teaching of the Buddha on the other hand is essentially intellectual.  The nature and tastes of his audience were a sufficient justification for his style, but it indicates a temper far removed from the unquestioning and childlike faith of Christ.  We can hardly conceive him using such a phrase as Our Father, but we may be sure that if he had done so he would have explained why and how and to what extent such words can be properly used of the Deity.

The most sceptical critics of the miracles recorded in the Gospels can hardly doubt that Christ possessed some special power of calming and healing nervous maladies and perhaps others.  Sick people naturally turned to him:  they were brought to him when he arrived in a town.  Though the Buddha was occasionally kind to the sick, no such picture is drawn of the company about him and persons afflicted with certain diseases could not enter the order.  When the merchant Anathapindika is seriously ill, he sends a messenger with instructions to inform the Buddha and Sariputta of his illness and to add in speaking to Sariputta that he begs him to visit him out of compassion[397].  He does not presume to address the same request to the Buddha.  Christ teaches that the world is evil or, perhaps we should say, spoiled, but wishes to remove the evil and found the Kingdom of Heaven:  the Buddha teaches that birth, sickness and death are necessary conditions of existence and that disease, which like everything else has its origin in Karma, can be destroyed only when the cause is destroyed[398].  Nor do we find ascribed to him that love of children and tenderness towards the weak and erring which are beautiful features in the portrait of Christ[399].  He had no prejudices:  he turned robust villains like Angulimala, the brigand, into saints and dined with prostitutes but one cannot associate him with simple friendly intercourse.  When he accepted invitations he did not so much join in the life of the family which he visited as convert the entertainment offered to him into an edifying religious service.  Yet in propaganda and controversy he was gracious and humane beyond the measure of all other teachers.  He did not call the priests of his time a generation of vipers, though he laughed at their ceremonies and their pretensions to superior birth.