In 1953, Auden attended a public lecture at which Joseph Campbell said that Christ and the Buddha were the same because spears had been used against both, although the ones used against Buddha had been transformed into flowers. Auden, as his friend Wendell Stacy Johnson recalled, “Exclaimed quite loudly that ‘On Good Friday the spears were real.’”
— Edward Mendelson, Later Auden, p. 252