Jesus In India — Page 129
CHAPTER FOUR 119 follower of the Vedas, for, after rejecting the Vedas he never gives any hint of such things, that thereafter any part of the evil life remained within him. On the contrary, he made very great claims thereafter and said that he had become a manifestation of God and had attained Nirvana. ¹ The Buddha has also stated that when man leaves the world accompanied by hellish deeds he is thrown into hell. And the sentinels of hell drag him to the king of hell, whose name is Yamah, and the condemned one is asked whether or not he had seen the following Five Messengers who had been sent to warn him. And they are the following: the period of child- hood, the period of old age, disease, being punished during one's life as evidence of the punishment in the hereafter, corpses of the dead which remind us of the transitory nature of the world. The condemned one replies that, ‘Sir, due to my own stupidity I did not ponder at all over any of these things. Thereupon the guardians of hell will drag him to the place of torment and secure him with chains of iron which would have been made so hot by fire as to have become red like the fire itself. The Buddha, moreo- ver, says that hell has several zones where sinners of different cate- gories will be cast. In short, all these teachings cry out aloud that the Buddhist religion gained something from the blessed personal example and influence of Jesus, the Messiah. I do not wish to elab- orate this point further, and close this section here, because the prophecy about the coming of Jesus, the Messiah, to this country has been so clearly spelled out in Buddhist literature that no one 1. According to Buddhist teaching, Nirvana is the state of perfect bliss attained when the soul is freed from all suffering and absorbed into the supreme spirit. [Publisher]