Barlaam and Josaphat: A Christian Tale of the Buddha
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Authors: Gui de Cambrai,Peggy McCracken
PENGUIN
CLASSICS
BARLAAM AND JOSAPHAT
GUI DE CAMBRAI
was a cleric from northern France. Around 1190, he composed
Le vengement Alixandre
, a continuation of the popular story of Alexander the Great, and around 1220â25 he adapted
Barlaam and Josaphat
from Latin into Old French verse. He is thought to have retired to a monastery at the end of his life.
PEGGY MCCRACKEN
is a professor of French, women's studies, and comparative literature at the University of Michigan. Her publications on medieval literature and culture include essays, books, edited collections, and, most recently, two coauthored volumes:
Marie de France: A Critical Companion,
with Sharon Kinoshita, and
In Search of the Christian Buddha
, with Donald S. Lopez Jr.
DONALD S. LOPEZ JR.
is the Arthur E. Link Distinguished University Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies at the University of Michigan, in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures. He edited
Buddhist Scriptures
for Penguin Classics and is the author of a number of books.
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This translation first published in Penguin Books 2014
Translation copyright © 2014 by Peggy McCracken
Introduction copyright © 2014 by Donald S. Lopez, Jr.
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ISBN
978-0-14-310701-9
ISBN
978-0-698-13750-9 (eBook)
Version_1
Introduction by
DONALD S. LOPEZ JR.
Translator's Preface by
PEGGY MCCRACKEN
Josaphat seeks knowledge of God
Barlaam teaches Josaphat about Judgment Day
Barlaam warns Josaphat about idolatry and teaches him about salvation
Barlaam shows Josaphat that he must abandon the world
Barlaam teaches Josaphat to store his treasure in heaven
Josaphat learns about reason and will
Josaphat learns the value of earthly possessions
Barlaam returns to his hermitage
Prince Aracin fails to find Barlaam
King Avenir attempts to win back his son
King Avenir calls for a public disputation
The Chaldeans begin the disputation with Nachor
The Greeks join the disputation
Nachor concludes his refutation of the pagans
A beautiful princess tempts Josaphat
King Avenir gives half his kingdom to Josaphat
King Avenir goes to war against his son
Prince Aracin plots to betray Josaphat
King Avenir converts and Christianity spreads
Josaphat wishes to leave his kingdom
A debate between Josaphat's body and soul
The narrator laments the sins of the present world
Barlaam and Josaphat
, one of the most popular stories in Europe during the Middle Ages, was translated from Latin into dozens of languages. For this reason at the very least, Peggy McCracken's translation of the famous Old French version by Gui de Cambrai, dating from the thirteenth century, deserves to be included in the Penguin Classics series. Barlaam and Josaphat were not simply literary characters; they were regarded as historical figures, and as saints, and credited with the miraculous, though of course mythical, conversion of the subcontinent of India from the perdition of pagan idolatry to the glory of the Christian faith. In 1571 the doge of Venice presented a bone from Josaphat's spine to King Sebastian of Portugal; the relic is enshrined today in St. Andrieskerk in Antwerp. In 1583, Pope Sixtus V authorized November 27 as Barlaam and Josaphat's saints' day; Josaphat was assigned August 26 by the Eastern Orthodox churches. A chapel with the dedication “Divo Josaphat” inscribed over the entrance was built in Palermo in the sixteenth century.
Yet despite the fame of
Barlaam and Josaphat
and its sainted protagonists, it is unlikely that the tale would have earned a place among today's classics without our knowledge of a single fact, one unknown to Gui de Cambrai and the other learned clerics, poets, and playwrights of the Middle Ages and Renaissance who retold the tale, and also unknown to their audiences, whether they read the story from an illuminated manuscript in a monastery, heard it from the pulpit in a church, or saw it performed on a stage:
Barlaam and Josaphat
is based on the life of the Buddha. The extent to which this is soâthat is, whether this fact should be emblazoned on the cover of a book or buried in a footnoteâis a question worthy of further consideration. However, there is no question that since this fact was discovered in Paris in the middle of the nineteenth century, it has captivated the academic imagination, inspiring generations of scholars to go in quest of
Barlaam and Josaphat
's origins.
The evidence of influence is found in the tale's echoes of three famous episodes from the life of the Buddha as traditionally told in Asia. In the first, after the birth of Prince Siddhartha, the future Buddha, the king summons the court astrologers to foretell his son's destiny. All but one predict that the child will become either a great monarch or a great saint; the remaining astrologer is certain that the boy will become a great saint. Alarmed that his son will not succeed him on the throne, the king builds a special palace where the prince will be shielded from all that is unpleasant and unattractive, in order to prevent him from becoming discouraged with life in the world. A very similar scene occurs in
Barlaam and Josaphat
: the king, a devotee of idols and a persecutor of Christians, hears the astrologers' predictions and fears that his son will some day become a Christian. He builds a special palace to prevent such a fate (see “King Avenir's son is born”).
The second episode takes place when, after living in the palace for twenty-nine years, Prince Siddhartha becomes curious about the world beyond the walls and asks his father to allow him to take an excursion with his charioteer. After initially refusing, the king relents, but has anything unpleasant removed from the royal route, musicians stationed in the trees, and the road lined with flowers and incense. However, the plan fails, and during four successive chariot rides the prince encounters, for the first time in his life, an old man, a sick man, a dead man, and finally a meditating monk, and in doing so learns of the realities of aging, sickness, and death, as well as the existence of those who seek to escape them. In
Barlaam and Josaphat
, Prince Josaphat takes two rides outside the city, encountering a blind man and a leper the first time and an old man the second (see “Josaphat leaves his palace”). He does not encounter a corpse or a meditating monk, but shortly after his second excursion the Christian monk Barlaam arrives at the palace, in disguise, to provide instruction in the Gospel to the son of the idolatrous king (see “Barlaam comes to Josaphat”).
In the third scene, after returning from his four chariot rides, Prince Siddhartha, now married and with a newborn son, requests his father's permission to leave his family and royal destiny behind, to go in search of a state beyond birth and death. The king refuses and attempts to distract the prince by having a group of courtesans beguile him with their beauty. But the prince is unmoved. Exhausted from singing and dancing for him, the courtesans fall asleep on the floor at the foot his throne. As he gazes on their sleeping forms, they remind him only of corpses. In
Barlaam and Josaphat
, King Avenir instructs a group of beautiful women to seduce the virgin Prince Josaphat. In one of the most powerful scenes in the story, a slave princess almost succeeds. The chastity of the prince is preserved when he has a vision of the hell that awaits him should he succumb to passion (see “A beautiful princess tempts Josaphat”).
This is the extent of the literary connection between the life of the Buddha and the story of
Barlaam and Josaphat
. Prince Siddhartha leaves the palace that same night and, after six years of ascetic practice, achieves enlightenment and becomes the Buddha (which means “awakened one”). He then teaches the path to liberation from suffering, over the course of a long life, passing into nirvana at the age of eighty. Prince Josaphat follows a very different path, as you will read in the pages that follow.
Although these three central elements of the plot of
Barlaam and Josaphat
clearly derive from the life of the Buddha, precisely how they passed from ancient India to medieval France is still not understood with complete historical accuracy. The connection between East and West was first discovered in 1853, when the German Indologist Theodor Benfey (1809â81) noted that one of the parables in
Barlaam and Josaphat
, the parable of the man in the well (see “King Avenir neglects his gods”), was also found in the
Pañcatantra
, a famous collection of Indian fables in Sanskrit. By this time there was among European philologists great interest in classical Sanskrit and, increasingly, in Buddhism. In 1844 the French scholar Eugène Burnouf (1801â52) had published his massive
Introduction à l'histoire du Buddhisme indien
, a work that was read with great interest by Schopenhauer, Schelling, Nietzsche, and Wagner in Germany and by Emerson and Thoreau in America. Three years later, a student of Burnouf, Philippe Ãdouard Foucaux (1811â94) published his translation from Tibetan of one of the most famous Indian biographies of the Buddha, the
Lalitavistara
(
Vast Game
), a work that likely dates from the third century CE.
In 1859 the French savant Ãdouard Laboulaye (1811â83) saw a direct parallel between
Barlaam and Josaphat
and the life of the Buddha, noting the clear similarity between the stories of the chariot rides. However, he did not identify a specific Buddhist text as the source of the story. This link would be provided in 1860 by the German folklorist and translator of
Barlaam and Josaphat
, Felix Liebrecht (1812â90), who argued that the
Lalitavistara
(which he had likely read in Foucaux's 1847 translation into French) was the source. Liebrecht turned out to be wrong about the
Lalitavistara
, but from that point until the present day, great scholarly labor has been invested in the task of tracing
Barlaam and Josaphat
back to its original source. Despite these efforts, the direct route has yet to be precisely mapped. Still, there has been much progress, ranging over continents and languages.
Gui de Cambrai's
Barlaam and Josaphat
(as well as the many other European vernacular versions) can be traced back to Latin sources, the earliest of which dates from 1048. This Latin text is a translation of the Greek version, long associated with Saint John of Damascus (d. 749), an attribution that was accepted long into the nineteenth century. The famous German philologist Friedrich Max Müller (1823â1900) imagined that a delegation from India had brought the
Lalitavistara
to John of Damascus, who then translated it into Greek (without explaining how the learned Christian saint could have known Sanskrit). However, it is now assumed that the Greek story was translated, not from Sanskrit, but from Georgian, and not in Damascus, but in Greece, more than two centuries later, by a different Christian monk: perhaps Euthymius the Georgian (d. 1028), abbot of a monastery on Mount Athos. The Georgian tale he translated, and to which he added all manner of Christian sermonizing, is called
The
Balavariani
and was likely composed by Georgian monks living in Jerusalem during the ninth or tenth century.
To this point, the line tracing
Barlaam and Josaphat
back in time is clear and straight. From here, however, it begins to become more obscure. Two Arabic works survive with the title
Kitab Bilawhar wa Budhasaf
(
The Book of Bilawhar and Budhasaf
), with the earlier of the two dating from sometime between 750 and 900. It is clear from the considerable overlap in the parables they recount that the Georgian version of
Barlaam and Josaphat
derives from this Arabic source, although scholars now assume that the exact Arabic version used by the Georgian monks has been lost. The Georgian monks took the basic story of a royal father who extols the virtues of life in the world and a royal son who extols the virtues of asceticism (a story with little overtly Muslim content) and then Christianized it, turning it into the story of an idolatrous king, a persecutor of Christians, and his virtuous son, who is converted to Christianity by the pious monk Barlaam. The prince then converts his father, and eventually all India, to the true faith. The many parables in the story were also easily Christianized, and references to the rather mysterious figure of the Buddha (al-Budd in the Arabic tale) were simply excised.
Here the trail goes cold. The Buddha lived and taught in northern India during the fifth century BCE. His teachings eventually spread throughout Asia, establishing a strong presence in what is today Pakistan and Afghanistan (we recall the colossal Bamiyan Buddhas that were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001), regions that had recently come under Muslim control at the time that
Kitab Bilawhar wa Budhasaf
was composed. But Buddhism had also been known in Persia during pre-Islamic times, and scholars speculate that
The
Book of Bilawhar and Budhasaf
derives from a Persian source, now lost.
There is also no conclusive evidence that would identify the original Buddhist source of the story. There are many versions of the life of the Buddha, versions that evolved over many centuries, and most of them contain the three scenesâin one form or anotherâthat also occur in
Barlaam and Josaphat
: the prophecy of the astrologers, the chariot rides, and the attempted seduction by courtesans. The path from language to language, however, marks the path of influence clearly: Josaphat in Latin is Ioasaph in Greek, Iodasaph in Georgian, Budhasaf in Arabic, and
bodhisattva
in Sanskrit. Bodhisattva, “one who aspires to enlightenment,” is the primary epithet of Prince Siddhartha prior to the time that he achieves enlightenment and becomes the Buddha.
I noted above that the story of the Buddha's influence on the composition of
Barlaam and Josaphat
was first discerned in the nineteenth century. This is accurate, but the similarities between the two stories were noted centuries before. In his famous work,
Description of the World
, Marco Polo describes the island of Sri Lanka, where his ship made port on his return voyage to Venice, perhaps in 1291. In the chapter that he devotes to Sri Lanka (which he calls Seilan), he provides a detailed account of the life of the Buddha (whom he calls Sagamoni Borcan, the Mongolian name for the Buddha, which he likely learned at the court of Kublai Khan in China). Indeed, Marco Polo's is the most detailed account of the life of the Buddha to appear in a European language to that point. It is also remarkably sympathetic, especially compared to the disparaging European descriptions of the Buddha found in the works of Christian missionaries to Asia in subsequent centuries. Polo says that if Sagamoni Borcan had been a Christian, “he would have been a great saint of Our Lord Jesus Christ, so good and pure was the life he led.”
In 1446 an unnamed editor of Polo's book inserted this sentence into the description of the Buddha's encounters with death and old age: “This is like the life of Saint Josaphat who was son of the King Avenir of those parts of India, and was converted to the Christian faith by Barlaam, as is read in the life and legend of the holy fathers.” In fifteenth-century Europe, Barlaam and Josaphat were far more famous than the Buddha. A century and half later, in 1612, the Portuguese soldier and chronicler Diogo de Couto (1542â1616) argued that the Buddha, whom he calls Budão, was in fact Josaphat, and that over the centuries the people of India had forgotten the true identity of the Christian saint. In his travels in India, de Couto even claimed to have found the palace that King Avenir built for his son.
But these brief references would go unnoticed for centuries, during which time
Barlaam and Josaphat
, once so famous, came to be forgotten, together with so many other saints' tales from the Middle Ages. The story would lose its audience in Europe, although it found a new one in Asia. In 1591, Jesuit missionaries published the story in Japanese, as part of their efforts to convert Buddhist Japan to Christianity.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European travelersâwhether they were explorers, traders, soldiers, diplomats, or missionariesâencountered the Buddha in many Asian lands. But because the Buddha has a different name in each of the languages of Asia, and because he is depicted in many different artistic styles, they did not recognize his images as representations of a single historical figure. Instead he was so many Asian idols, known by different names: Xaca in Japan, Fo in China, Buddu in Ceylon, Sommonacodom in Siam, Sciacchiá-Thubbá in Tibet. Only at the end of the seventeenth century was it discovered that the idol worshipped in Siam represented the same god worshipped in Japan. Over the course of the eighteenth century, it would be concluded that this god had been a historical figure, although where he came from remained a topic of debate. Some thought he had come from Egypt. Others said he was originally the Norse god Odin. Only in the nineteenth century, with the rise of the science of philology, did scholars in Europe develop the ability to read Buddhist texts with a high degree of accuracyâtexts in Mongolian, Tibetan, Chinese, Pali, and Sanskrit. It was then that European attitudes toward the Buddha began to change.