One difficulty incidental to the treatment of Asiatic religions in European languages is the necessity, or at any rate the ineradicable habit, of using well-known words like God and soul as the equivalents of Asiatic terms which have not precisely the same content and which often imply a different point of view.
For practical life it is wise and charitable to minimize religious differences and emphasize points of agreement.
But this willingness to believe that others think as we do becomes a veritable vice if we are attempting an impartial exposition of their ideas.
If the English word God means the deity of ordinary Christianity, who is much the same as Allah or Jehovah-that is to say the creator of the world and enforcer of the moral law-then it would be better never to use this word in writing of the religions of India and Eastern Asia, for the concept is almost entirely foreign to them.
Even the greater Hindu deities are not really God, for those who follow the higher life can neglect and almost despise them, without, however, denying their existence.
On the other hand Brahman, the pantheos of India, though equal to the Christian God in majesty, is really a different conception, for he is not a creator in the ordinary sense: he is impersonal and though not evil, yet he transcends both good and evil.
He might seem merely a force more suited to be the subject matter of science than of religion, were not meditation on him the occupation, and union with him the goal, of many devout lives.
And even when Indian deities are most personal, as in the Vishnuite sects, it will be generally found that their relations to the world and the soul are not those of the Christian God.
It is because the conception of superhuman existence is so different in Europe and Asia that Asiatic religions often seem contradictory or corrupt: Buddhism and Jainism, which we describe as atheistic, and the colourless respectable religion of educated Chinese, become in their outward manifestations unblushingly polytheistic.