and Panjab, and to be remarkable for the completeness and efficiency of its organization.  It maintains missionary colleges, orphanages and schools.  Affiliated to it is a society for the purification (shuddhi) of Mohammedans, Christians and outcasts, that is for turning them into Hindus and giving them some kind of caste.  It would appear that those who undergo this purification do not always become members of the Samaj but are merged in the ordinary Hindu community where they are accepted without opposition if also without enthusiasm.

10. Change and Permanence in Buddhism

Thus we have a record of Indian thought for about 3000 years.  It has directly affected such distant points as Balkh, Java and Japan and it is still living and active.  But life and action mean change and such wide extension in time and space implies variety.  We talk of converting foreign countries but the religion which is transplanted also undergoes conversion or else it cannot enter new brains and hearts.  Buddhism in Ceylon and Japan, Christianity in Scotland and Russia are not the same, although professing to reverence the same teachers.  It is easy to argue the other way, but it can only be done by setting aside as non-essential differences of great practical importance.  Europeans are ready enough to admit that Buddhism is changeable and easily corrupted but it is not singular in that respect[31].  I doubt if Lhasa and Tantrism are further from the teaching of Gotama than the Papacy, the Inquisition, and the religion of the German Emperor, from the teaching of Christ.

A religion is the expression of the thought of a particular age and cannot really be permanent in other ages which have other thoughts.  The apparent permanence of Christianity is due first to the suppression of much original teaching, such as Christ’s turning the cheek to the smiter and Paul’s belief in the coming end of the world, and secondly to the adoption of new social ideals which have no place in the New Testament, such as the abolition of slavery and the improved status of women.

Buddhism arising out of Brahmanism suggests a comparison with Christianity arising out of Judaism, but the comparison breaks down in most points of detail.  But there is one real resemblance, namely that Buddhism and Christianity have both won their greatest triumphs outside the land of their birth.  The flowers of the mind, if they can be transplanted at all, often flourish with special vigour on alien soil.  Witness the triumphs of Islam in the hands of the Turks and Mughals, the progress of Nestorianism in Central Asia, and the spread of Manichaeism in both the East and West outside the limits of Persia.  Even so Lamaism in Tibet and Amidism in Japan, though scholars may regard them as singular perversions, have more vitality than any branch of Buddhism which has existed in India since the seventh century.  But even here the parallel with Christian sects is imperfect.  It