The Religions of India c19.7

c19.7

We shall not canvass in detail views that would be mentioned only to be rejected. Even the brilliant study of Senart,³ in which the figure of Buddha is resolved into a solar type and the history of the reformer becomes a sun-myth, deserves only to be mentioned and laid aside. Since the publication of the canonical books of the southern Buddhists there is no longer any question in regard to the human reality of the great knight who illumined, albeit with anything but heavenly light, the darkness of Brahmanical belief. Oldenberg⁴ has taken Senart seriously, and seriously answered him. But Napoleon and Max Müller have each been treated as sun-myths, and Senart’s essay is as convincing as either *jeu d'esprit*.