Note 159 — LECTURE III. THE BUDDHA OF THE PITAKAS: THE CHRIST OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.

This is a very great assumption indeed. Foucaux, its translator, assigns it to the first century B.C., but T. W. Rhys Davids assigns it to some Nepaulese poet “who lived between six hundred and a thousand years after Buddha’s death” (Hibbert Lectures, pp. 197, 204). A Chinese version is said to have been in existence about 70 A.D. Rajendralal Mitra, its English translator, admits this in his Introduction, p. 48, but whether that was a version, or another book altogether, or how far it corresponded with the Lalita Vistara, no scholar has been confident to say. Dr. Beal also mentions a life of Buddha by Asvaghosha as probably in circulation about the middle of the Christian era (Chinese Buddhism, p. 73).