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The Story of The Buddha, as told in Medieval Europe

By Danièle Cybulskie

Much has been made of the differences between various faiths over time, but many of the stories we associate with a certain faith have actually been influenced in some way or another by others. A curious case of a medieval story which crosses religious boundaries is the life of Josaphat, a Christian saint whose origins appear to be not Christian at all. His life story is the life story of the Buddha.

In the introduction to Peggy McCracken’s translation of Barlaam and Josaphat (written by Gui de Cambrai in the twelfth century), Donald S. Lopez Jr. demonstrates the connection clearly. The story of the Buddha, he says, has three important moments which are fairly consistent. When he is born, the father of Prince Sidhārtha (who will one day become the Buddha) asks astrologers to tell his future. The astrologers predict he will either become a great king or a saint – one alone is convinced he will not be a king at all, but a saint instead. Disheartened, the king builds a palace to shield Sidhārtha from the world in order to encourage his desire to be king. In Barlaam and Josaphat, the same thing happens, with the difference being that the undesirable option is Josaphat will become a Christian. Like Sidhārtha, Josaphat is locked away in a palace of pleasures; neither is to know anything of the ugly side of life.

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The second commonality is that, despite their kingly fathers’ best efforts and entreaties, the princes leave the palace and encounter representatives of humanity who begin to change their views of life. For Sidhārtha, the encounters are with “an old man, a sick man, a dead man, and finally a meditating monk.” For Josaphat, it is a blind man, a person who has leprosy, and an elderly man.

Finally, the last commonality is that when the princes both wish to follow their own paths, Sidhārtha “to go in search of a state beyond birth and death” and Josaphat to become a Christian ascetic, their fathers try to use their sexuality to change their minds, plying them with women. While Sidhārtha is not tempted, Josaphat comes close to giving in, in part because one “slave princess” promises to convert to Christianity if only he’ll marry her (or, failing that, just sleep with her once). Josaphat’s longing for her conversion (along with her beauty and tears) almost undoes him, but in the end, he refuses, holding on to his virginity. (Sidhārtha, incidentally, is a husband and father at the same point in his story.)

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Although these are the only places where the stories converge, their similarity is too close to be coincidental. Lopez traces the evolution of the story from what was likely to have been a lost Persian original, to Arabic, then to Georgian, Greek, Latin, and finally (in the case of Gui de Cambrai) French. Linguistically, Lopez makes the connection even clearer, from Bodhisattva (Sanskrit), to Būdāsaf (Arabic), to Iodasaph (Georgian), to Ioasaph (Greek), to Josaphat (Latin). This translation and transmutation of the story happened over the course of many centuries, with the Buddha actually having lived in the fifth century BCE, and the story having made the leap from (possibly) Persian to Arabic around the eighth or ninth century CE, then translated into Georgian by monks in Jerusalem in the tenth century, and into Greek around the year 1,000 CE. As Peggy McCracken says, Barlaam and Josaphat was very well loved: “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”. Gui de Cambrai’s version appears in the twelfth century.

The actual story of Barlaam and Josaphat, beyond its remarkable origin, is relatively straightforward in terms of medieval storytelling. Barlaam is a “most wise and holy monk” who lives as a hermit, and is instructed by divine revelation to seek out Josaphat. He sneaks into the palace and teaches him about Christianity, eventually baptizing him. After some hardships and trials, Josaphat ends up converting thousands (including his father). Medieval audiences could learn along with Josaphat from Barlaam’s teaching and parables, which don’t deviate much from standard saintly stories and Christian sources of the time. So, perhaps it is the elements which made the Buddha’s story so compelling that medieval Christians found appealing in Barlaam and Josaphat.

Interestingly, the similarities between the two stories didn’t go unnoticed by medieval people who were exposed to both. As Lopez notes, Marco Polo describes the story of the Buddha in his discussion of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) with the same elements: a prince locked away with only pleasures and beautiful, seductive women, who encounters humanity on the streets and turns away from his royal duties for a life of contemplation. (Marco Polo has an impressive 30,000 women serving the prince, named Sakyamuni Burqan in Nigel Cliff’s translation.) Lopez points out that an (anonymous) editor’s note in a 1446 edition of Marco Polo’s Travels explicitly makes the connection between Sakyamuni Burqan and Josaphat. The editor’s note “This is like the life of Saint Josaphat” doesn’t imply that Josaphat’s life was derived from Sakyamuni Burqan’s; if anything, he might have suspected it to be the other way around. Indeed, as Lopez points out, a Portuguese writer in the early seventeenth century declares that the Buddha’s story (“Budão”) was based on Josaphat’s.

While Gui de Cambrai’s Barlaam and Josaphat is a well-written story with some entertaining and fascinating asides (“Our God … would be wrong to take pity on high nobles – they are judged by their own unjust conduct toward the poor”), perhaps the most significant part of it is not the tale, itself, but the journey that shaped it. Clearly, the story of the Buddha has a lasting appeal that transcends language and time.

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Donald S. Lopez Jr.’s introduction is found in Peggy McCracken’s translation called Barlaam and Josaphat: A Christian Tale of the Buddha, and you can find Marco Polo’s retelling of Sakyamuni Burqan’s life in any version of his Travels (I used Nigel Cliff’s).

You can follow Danièle Cybulskie on Twitter @5MinMedievalist

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Top Image: Barlaam instructing Josaphat. British Library MS Egerton 745  fol. 131r

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