For about 150 years scholars of unusual temerity haveasserted that themes found in Buddhist texts, manyof them celebrated in surviving Buddhist sculpture,can be found in the New Testament in more or lessrecognizable forms. If this were true, as in thecase of Japanese philosophy showing through the workof M. Heidegger, students of the New Testament,already overburdened with conspissated conjectures,would be obliged to enter into a field which is notonly unfamiliar to them, but, as a rival,unsympathetic. Few would take on such an adventuregratis. It has been shownelsewhere that parallels can be sorted into thosewhich could have arisen anywhere, being inventedmany times over (such as the Golden Rule); thosewhich are unlikely to have been invented more thanonce, but which can be attributed to one culture orthe other, without hope of our deciding which isearlier; and finally those which are completely athome in one culture (say the Jewish) and exotic inthe other (say the Buddhist), so that the conjecturethat the latter “borrowed” from the former isattractive.