The Tibetan lama listened respectfully to the Jesuit priest and replied, “Your religion is the same as ours.” Lydia Maria Child writes in The Atlantic Monthly:
Those who strive to establish a monopoly of labor are accustomed to sneer at the Chinese as “Pagans.” They urge that citizenship ought not to be granted to them, because their religion is different from ours. Yet those who talk in this way make no objection to receiving Irish emigrants and intrusting them with the elective franchise. But is the Buddhist religion, which prevails in China, much more foreign to our customs and our modes of thinking and believing than the Roman Catholic religion is? There are, in fact, many striking resemblances between the two, and in some particulars the parallel is so close that it is difficult to perceive any difference, except in names. I will verify this declaration by pointing out some of the most obvious points of similarity.
Buddha Sakia — which means the Holy Sakia, or Saint Sakia — is reverenced by his numerous followers as Christians reverence Jesus Christ. The date of his birth is veiled in obscurity, and varies much in different countries. According to Mongol records it was two thousand one hundred and thirty-four years before the Christian era; but, according to Chinese records, it was one thousand twenty-nine years. Sir William Jones and other learned Oriental scholars, who have examined the subject, think they find sufficient evidence that lie came into this world about a thousand years before Christ.
