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from Western thought, as and when necessary. This tends to make the point under consideration clear and also tends to suggest how East and West have some common thoughts; for example, while discussing Buddha's discourse on fire to indcate the ceaseless fluss of becoming called the world, SR ciles a parallel from Heraclitus viz. "this world an eternally living fire" and proceeds to comment: "Buddha and Heraclitus both use fire, the most mutable of the elements to represent the metaphysical principle of becoming", (IP. p. 638, fn. 1). He quotes also from shelley, the following lines :
"Worlds on worlds are rolling ever,
From creation to decay,
Like the bubbles on a river,
Spankling, bursting, borne away" (IP, p. 368).10
15
Elsewhere in the context of the current of otherworldiness in John the Baptist, Jesus and paul SR notes that "the moral teaching of Jesus with its ascefic and otherworldly emphasis has been anticipated several hundred years by Upanisads and Buddha". [Eastern Religions and Western thought (=ERWT), Oxford, 1939, p. 173] and proceeds to quote from T. W. Rhys Davids, 16
Elsewhere while drawing a parallel between Jesus and Buddha he appreciatively writes: "Just as Buddha condemns the gloomy ascetic practices, which prevailed in ancient India, Jesus goes beyond John, the Baptist's emphasis on observances and ascetic rites. Even Buddha condemns ceremonial religion emphasing Baptism, Jesus insists less on sacraments and more on the opening of oneself." (ERWT, p.180). 17
From the literary point of view it may be observed that "in him we have a combination of style and scholarship..... In all that he (i.e. SR, bracket ours) writes is marked by elegance of literary form. His felicity of expression is amazing. He can be numbored amongst the greatest stylists in the history of philosophy and can be classed along with Schelling, Schopenhauer and Bergson-among those who have raised philosophic prose to the level of creative literature...... He endows his sentences with vitality that the frozen fossils of long forgotten ideas burst forth into new life."18 The use of significant objectives and proverblike general statements tend to enhance the vitality; mark the significant adjective "workable" in" The Buddha gives a workable system for monks and lay people." (DP, Introduction, p. 22); note proverblike remark: "it is those who do not see the truth that strike in the path of fiction." (IP., p. 353).
Finally, it may be said that his beautiful, elegant, flowing and lucid style coupled with transparent ideas, constructive and interpretative,
