Barlaam and Josaphat: A Christian Tale of the Buddha Read Free

becomes the conduit for the story of the Buddha to travel incognito from Asia to Europe. The story of the Buddha, whom European missionaries would excoriate for centuries as an idol and as a purveyor of idolatry, is transformed by Christian monks into the story of a prince, called Prince Josaphat rather than Prince Siddhartha, who converts the pagans of India from idolatry to Christianity. The Buddhist prince who is a bodhisattva becomes a prince named Budhasaf then Iodasaph then Ioasaph then Josaphat, and as Josaphat he becomes a Christian saint. Yet as that saint fell into obscurity, the original bodhisattva—once but one of many Asian idols known by many names—coalesced into the figure of the Buddha and came to be respected as the founder of a great world religion.
    And perhaps here we have the ultimate irony. A story about a heathen, the Buddha, is turned into a tale about the conversion of heathens, a story that would become a forgotten fantasy. Forgotten, that is, until the heathen reached into the darkness and pulled his Christian brother into the light, restoring
Barlaam and Josaphat
to the fame, surely a most complicated fame, that it justly deserves.
    DONALD S. LOPEZ JR.

Translator’s Preface
    Gui de Cambrai’s
Barlaam and Josaphat
is one of many medieval versions of the life of Saint Josaphat and his teacher, Saint Barlaam. The story appeared in Latin in the eleventh century and was subsequently translated into virtually every European vernacular language—ten versions appeared in French alone between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, and three of those are verse translations. 1 We will never know with certainty what made the story so popular among medieval audiences. They may have appreciated the relatively simple lessons in Christian doctrine and belief, or they may have enjoyed the many parables that Barlaam uses to teach Prince Josaphat about Christianity. The setting of the story in India may have had some appeal, or audiences may have been drawn to the story of conflict between a pagan father and his Christian son.
    The early part of the story has long been recognized as a retelling of the life of the Buddha: a young prince is raised in isolation from the world because his father fears he will renounce the secular world to become an ascetic, as foretold by astrologers; the prince subsequently discovers illness, old age, and death, and chooses to renounce the world in order to seek a spiritual reward. The Buddha’s story traveled through many cultures and languages as it was transformed into the story of a Christian saint. Scholars believe that a version of the life of the Buddha was translated into Middle Persian (this translation does not survive), and then into the Arabic
Book of Bilawhar and Budhasaf
. 2 The Buddha appears in the Arabic version of the story as the prophet al-Budd, but the main protagonist is Prince Budhasaf, whose name is likely derived from the Sanskrit word
bodhisattva
. Although the Arabic text retains elements of the Buddha’s life story, the ascetic religion promoted in the text is not clearly associated with Buddhism or Islam.
The Book of Bilawhar and Budha
saf
uses parables to illustrate and emphasize the evils of the world and the dangers of worldly values. It preaches the renunciation of the world and its pleasures and promotes ascetic values. Those values were firmly grounded in Christian belief when the text was translated into Georgian, probably in the eleventh century. The Georgian translation is preserved in two versions. In both the long version, translated under the title
The Balavariani
,
and the shorter version,
The Wisdom of Balahvar
,
a pagan Indian prince receives the teachings of a Christian hermit and embraces Christianity, refusing the worldly values of his idolatrous father. 3 The Georgian version of the story was next translated into Greek, also probably in the eleventh century. From Greek, the story was translated into Latin, the