Edwin Arnold as poetizer and as paganizer: containing an examination of the "Light of Asia" for its literature and for its Buddhism

Light of Asia is the most significant work of the English poet Edwin Arnold. It is a poem telling about the life, personality, and philosophy of the Indian prince Siddhartha Gautama, who after the Enlightenment became Buddha Shakyamuni, a spiritual teacher, the founder of Buddhism. It is pertinent to say that the present volume, although essentially in the original design and formally still performed, criticism, literary and doctrinal, on Mr. Arnold's very popular poem, offers, in the form in which it is now presented to the public, a criticism of Buddhism ( in the ethical part of the so-called great religion). This book contains nowhere else to find material in a form accessible to the general reader for a fair independent judgment about the true ethical merits of the pagan doctrine, which has recently been widely praised among us. It is thus a significant contribution that Christian teachers will especially appreciate in the current discussion of comparative religion.