Page:Barlaam and Josaphat. English lives of Buddha.djvu/93

lxxxvii this instance, the relationship may be of an inverse kind. The early date of the Odyssey makes it practically impossible that Homer could have been influenced by any transmission from India. On the other hand, resemblance of the two legends is not so close as to force us to assume derivation on either side.

10. Women as Demons.—The lad who had never seen a woman, and was told the first one he saw was a demon, yet prefers the demon to anything else he had seen, is almost the only parable of Barlaam which has any humour in it. It is a distinctly Indian conception, though it chimed in sufficiently with the Christian view of the wickedness of woman to be very popular among the mediæval preachers. It occurs in both of the great Indian books, the Mahdbharata and the Ramayana so that its Indian origin is undoubted. Indeed, it is one of the points requiring further investigation whether the conception of the innate wickedness of woman, which forms a stock subject of Christian homiletics, was not derived from the similar Buddhistic conception. Some time ago Dr. Donaldson showed, in the Contemporary Review (September 1889), that the de-