The Dawn and the Day; Or, The Buddha and the Christ, Part I — Inside the Classic

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In Category - Theology

Authors: Niles, Henry Thayer, 1825-1901 Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2004 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: Religious poetry; Gautama Buddha -- Poetry; Jesus Christ -- Poetry Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

Edition facts

Words 41,832

Reading time 182 min

Text sections 4

For The Dawn and the Day; Or, The Buddha and the Christ, Part I — Inside the Classic, the stored edition analysis reports 41,832 words, 3 hr 2 min estimated reading time, and 4 detected text sections.

The text analysis averages about 35.1 words per sentence, while the detected sections provide another way to judge how the source is divided.

Project Gutenberg metadata also associates the work with “Religious poetry,” connecting these edition facts with the source record’s subject description.

Source: Project Gutenberg record #14360

Henry Thayer Niles's 1894 poem juxtaposes the Buddha and Christ through parallel narratives, using blank verse to explore shared ethical foundations and divergent doctrines. The excerpt shows Buddha intervening to stop a sacrificial goat, arguing against bloodshed with vivid similes of sin as corrosion or disease.

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File: pg14360

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This was an age of knowledge, art and war, When the knights-errant of the ancient world, Adventures seeking, roamed with brazen swords Which by a wondrous art--then known, now lost-- Were hard as flint, and edged to cut a hair Or cleave in twain a warrior armor-clad And armed with shields adorned by Vulcan's art, Wonder of coming times and theme for bards.[1] Then science searched through nature's heights and depths. Heaven's canopy thick set with stars was mapped, The constellations named, and all the laws searched out That guide their motions, rolling sphere on sphere.[2] Then men by reasonings piled up mountain high Thought to scale heaven, and to dethrone heaven's king, Whose imitators weak, with quips and quirks And ridicule would now destroy all sacred things. This age great Homer and old Hesiod sang, And gods they made of hero, artist, bard.

At length this twilight of the ages fades, And starless night now sinks upon the world-- An age of iron, cruel, dark and cold. On Asia first this outer darkness fell, Once seat of paradise, primordial peace, Perennial harmony and perfect love. A despot's will was then a nation's law; An idol's car crushed out poor human lives, And human blood polluted many shrines. Then human speculation made of God A shoreless ocean, distant, waveless, vast, Of truth that sees not and unfeeling love, Whence souls as drops were taken back to fall, Absorbed and lost, when, countless ages passed, They should complete their round as souls of men, Of beasts, of birds and of all creeping things. And, even worse, the cruel iron castes, One caste too holy for another's touch, Had every human aspiration crushed, The common brotherhood of man destroyed, And made all men but Pharisees or slaves. And worst of all--and what could e'en be worse?-- Woman, bone of man's bone, flesh of his flesh, The equal partner of a double life, Who in the world's best days stood by his side To lighten every care, and heighten every joy, And in the world's decline still clung to him, She only true when all beside were false, When all were cruel she alone still kind, Light of his hearth and mistress of his home, Sole spot where peace and joy could still be found-- Woman herself cast down, despised was made Slave to man's luxury and brutal lust. Then war was rapine, havoc, needless blood, Infants impaled before their mothers' eyes, Women dishonored, mutilated, slain, Parents but spared to see their children die. Then peace was but a faithless, hollow truce, With plots and counter-plots; the dagger's point And poisoned cup instead of open war; And life a savage, grim conspiracy Of mutual murder, treachery and greed. O dark and cruel age! O cruel creeds! O cruel men! O crushed and bleeding hearts, That from the very ground in anguish cry: "Is there no light--no hope--no help--no God?"

[1]See Hesiod's description of the shield of Hercules, the St. George of that ancient age of chivalry.

[2]See the celebrated zodiac of Denderah, given in Landseer's "Sabaean Researches," and in Napoleon's "Egypt."

The Buddha and the Christ.

Northward from Ganges' stream and India's plains An ancient city crowned a lofty hill, Whose high embattled walls had often rolled The surging, angry tide of battle back. Walled on three sides, but on the north a cliff, At once the city's quarry and its guard, Cut out in galleries, with vaulted roofs[1] Upborne upon cyclopean columns vast, Chiseled with art, their capitals adorned With lions, elephants, and bulls, life size, Once dedicate to many monstrous gods Before the Aryan race as victors came, Then prisons, granaries and magazines, Now only known to bandits and wild beasts. This cliff, extending at each end, bends north, And rises in two mountain-chains that end In two vast snow-capped Himalayan peaks, Between which runs a glittering glacial stream, A mighty moving mass of crystal ice, Crushing the rocks in its resistless course; From which bursts forth a river that had made Of all this valley one great highland lake, Which on one side had burst its bounds and cut In myriad years a channel through the rock, So narrow that a goat might almost leap From cliff to cliff--these cliffs so smooth and steep The eagles scarce could build upon their sides; This yawning chasm so deep one scarce could hear The angry waters roaring far below.

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Henry Thayer Niles's The Dawn and the Day; Or, The Buddha and the Christ, Part I (1894) opens with a preface that frames the entire work as a comparative theological exercise. Niles invokes Humboldt and Max Müller to argue that fundamental moral truths—brotherhood, love, overcoming evil with good—appear in both Buddhism and Christianity, while dogmas and legends remain “as wide asunder as the poles.” The poem itself then dramatizes this tension through narrative verse, beginning with a scene in which Buddha prevents the sacrifice of a goat, reasoning that “God, being good” cannot “delight in blood.”

A Preface of Parallels and Polemics

Niles’s preface does not merely introduce; it establishes the poem’s intellectual stakes. He compares Humboldt’s observation of analogous flora on different continents to Max Müller’s discovery of “Dyaus Pitar” as a cognate for “Zeus Pater” and “Our Father.” This analogy serves to naturalize the presence of Christian-like truths in Buddhism without requiring direct borrowing. Niles explicitly rejects both the theory that Buddhists derived their ethics from Nestorian Christians and the counter-claim that Christianity borrowed from Buddhist missionaries. Instead, he posits a common divine source. The preface thus functions as a theological argument in miniature, preparing the reader to view the ensuing narrative not as mere story but as evidence of universal religious harmony.

Buddha’s Rhetoric of Moral Causality

In the central excerpt, Buddha’s intervention at the sacrifice is less a miracle than a sustained ethical lecture. He employs a series of similes to describe sin: it works “like corroding rust and eating moth,” “like poisoned blood,” “like deadly drug,” “like fell disease.” Each image emphasizes internal, automatic consequence rather than external punishment. The passage culminates in a garden metaphor: “patient labor, day by day, / Uprooting cherished evils one by one” is required to grow the “precious seed” of virtue. Niles’s Buddha does not invoke divine command but natural law—sin produces its own suffering, and reform requires gradual cultivation. The king and priests are persuaded not by authority but by the logic of these analogies, and the altar is replaced with flowers.

Landscape as Moral Geography

After the sacrifice scene, the poem shifts to a detailed description of the landscape as Siddhartha departs. The “five bold hills” and “two outer gates” of the mountain rampart are mapped with precision: the western gate opens “toward Gaya, through the red Barabar hills,” and the Phalgu River winds past lotus-covered plains. This geographical specificity grounds the narrative in a real topography, but Niles also uses it to mark a transition. Siddhartha becomes homeless—“Buddha had not whereon to lay his head”—and the description of his journey is juxtaposed with a meditation on how “men marked distance in those ancient times” versus the “headlong age” of the present. The landscape thus serves as both setting and symbol of the renunciation central to the Buddha’s path.

Readers should attend to how Niles balances narrative momentum with doctrinal exposition. The poem’s blank verse often shifts between concrete action (loosing the goat, walking through the gate) and extended simile or moral commentary. The preface’s argument about shared fundamentals versus divergent dogmas provides a lens for interpreting these shifts: the story illustrates the fundamentals, while the dogmatic differences may emerge in later parts not included here. This first part establishes a Buddha who teaches through analogy and example, setting the stage for a Christ whose teachings may be presented in parallel form.

I’ve often thought Niles’s Buddha, halting that poor goat with such gentle urgency, shares a quiet kinship with the psalmists’ pleading for mercy. Both knew the weight of blood and the ache for something holier. In The Dawn and the Day that cry feels ancient; in The Expositor's Bible: The Psalms, Vol. 1 Psalms I.-XXXVIII. — Text and Context it breathes again, just as raw.