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

his son’s domain, realizes his error, and converts to Christianity. In Gui de Cambrai’s
Barlaam and Josaphat
, the king sees the prosperity of his son’s kingdom, understands that Josaphat has converted all his people and many of King Avenir’s own, and resolves to take back the part of his land that he gave to his son. Avenir calls his vassals to war, and they march on Josaphat’s kingdom. The king’s son defends his land with the approval and participation of his archbishop, John of Damascus; the Christians defeat the so-called Saracens; and King Avenir converts to Christianity. The narrative of the war between the Saracen father and the Christian son resembles an Old French epic, or
chanson de geste
, in its opposition of the Christians’ just cause to the error of the nonbelievers, and in its recital of blows exchanged between knights and its detailed accounts of heroic deeds in battle. The resemblance of the war between Josaphat’s Christians and King Avenir’s pagan Saracens to Crusade warfare is unmistakable—Gui even calls King Avenir’s men Turks, and in one of the final sections of the story the narrator inserts a lament about the Christian noblemen who have failed to regain Jerusalem, and he condemns those who took up the cross and promised to go on Crusade but then failed ever to leave their homes.
    The second innovation of Gui de Cambrai’s
Barlaam and Josaphat
is its debate between personifications of Josaphat’s body and soul
.
After Josaphat secures his Christian realm and witnesses his father’s conversion, he leaves his kingdom to seek his master, Barlaam, in his wilderness hermitage. He wanders for two years in search of Barlaam and lives a life of harsh deprivation. His body starves as he cares for his soul, and at this point in the narrative Gui inserts a dialogue in which Josaphat’s body complains vociferously about its treatment by Josaphat’s soul. Again here Gui imitates another popular medieval literary genre that pits the appetites of the body against the spiritual desires of the soul. 6 Gui’s version is a lively exchange between a whining, complaining body and a strict and unforgiving soul. It allows the narrator to reiterate in a sometimes humorous key the dangers that worldly pleasures pose to spiritual rewards, and to emphasize the values of renunciation that are promoted throughout the story.
    Gui de Cambrai’s
Barlaam and Josaphat
is not significantly different from other versions of the story, apart from these additions of the war episode and the body-and-soul debate. However, its feudal vocabulary and the social commentary addressed to a noble audience give the poem a grounding in contemporary culture despite the story’s location in a faraway, rather vaguely located India. Gui’s version is longer than many others, and not only because of its added episodes and narratorial interventions. He also extends the characters’ speeches, giving them more emotional depth and offering more details about their motivations. Gui adds wordplay and puns, and uses elaborate metaphors to describe emotional states.
    I have not attempted to translate all the wordplay and punning into modern English. What follows is an accurate, though not word-for-word, translation of Gui de Cambrai’s Old French. Gui is fond of repetition, not only of words, but also of nearly identical verses or phrases. I have eliminated many of these, and I have often varied the vocabulary in order to strive for a more fluent and economical English translation. Verb tenses fluctuate between past and present in Gui’s text, and I have used a consistent past tense. I have also removed many of the brief formulas of oral performance (“Know this . . . ,” “I believe”) that seem intended to extend the line of verse rather than to offer a significant narratorial intervention. Gui de Cambrai’s
Barlaam and Josaphat
may