86 Ancient Ideals
confl ict with other tribes. The sense of his universal mission is not
always fully with him. And if this broadly loving view is hard for
Jesus to sustain, it can only be more diffi cult for other men and
women. Here Jesus is willing to be taught by another, a woman,
and set again on the path of compassion. Like most of us he is
tempted by the belief that only those who look like us and speak our
language and follow our customs are genuinely human. The rest are
Gentiles, the rest are, perhaps, dogs. The strug gle to attain the Soul
State of compassion is great— great for us, and at least on one occa-
sion, it is a challenge for Jesus himself. “Do not give what is holy to
dogs,” Jesus says in Matthew, “and do not throw your pearls before
swine, or they will trample them underfoot and turn and maul you”
(7.6). The passage is interpretable in many ways. But after the en-
counter with the Syrophoenician woman, it surely evokes Jesus’ oc-
casionally wavering view of who is permitted to hear the gospel of
compassion and who is not.
Jesus does not always act in a conventionally pious way. He
doesn’t always live in perfect tune with his own teachings. In
the temple he picks up a whip to chase the moneylenders away. He
blasts the fi g tree because something about it off ends him. What it
is we do not really know. He tells his disciples that when people
refuse them hospitality, they need to shake off the dust from their
feet on the off enders’ doorsteps, and retribution will follow. Jesus
apparently has a willful, wayward streak with which he struggles.
Like the Buddha he is human and heir to the sorrows and tempta-
tions attendant. Like the Buddha, he is not unlike ourselves.
In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus makes his own confusion about his
role manifest. Pious commentators tend to believe that Jesus is
posing a rhetorical question when he asks his followers: “Who do
men say I am?” But there is more than a small chance that Jesus is
being quite sincere. His own teaching is so original, even while
being potently traditional, that it would be no won der if he were in-