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826
GÍTA-RAHASYA OR KARMA-YOGA
been adopted by the Mahāyāna Buddhist sect at least 200 to 300 years before Christ, from the Bhagavadgitā. But Mr. Arthur Lilly has authoritatively shown in his books that this similarity does not exist only as regards these things, but that there are hundreds of other small and big incidents, in which there is a similar similarity between the Christian and the Buddhist religions. Nay, the symbol of the Cross, which has become sacred to Christians on account of the fact that Christ was crucified on a Cross, had also become a holy symbol in the Vedic and Buddhistic religions in the shape of a 'svastika', hundreds of years before Christ; and modern research scholars have proved that not only in Egypt and other countries in the ancient continents of the earth, but even in Peru and Mexico in America, the svastika was looked upon as an auspicious sign many centuries before Columbus. From this one has to draw the conclusion, that the svastika sign, which had become a matter of regard and reverence long before the date of Christ, was made use of in one particular way by the devotees of Christ. There is also a great deal of similarity between the Buddhist monks and the old Christian missionaries (specially the earliest preachers) so far as their dress and religious observances are concerned. For instance, the ceremony of initiation after a bath, that is to say 'baptism', was in vogue long before the date of Christ; and it has now been proved that Buddhist monks had wholly adopted the procedure of sending religious preachers to different countries and thus propagating their religion, long before the date of Christian missionaries.
It is quite natural for a thinking person to ask himself why there should be such a strange and comprehensive similarity between the lives and the moral preachings of Buddha and Christ, and also between the religious observances of both these religionst.
* See The Secret of the Pacific by O. Reginald Enoch, 1912, Pp. 248–252.
+ Mr. Arthur Lily has written a separate book on this subjectcalled Buddhism in Christendom; and he has also briefly expressed his opinion in the last four chapters of his book, Buddha and Buddhism. The exposition made by me in this part of the Appendix kas koon made principally on the authority of this book. The
