Barlaam and Josaphat: A Christian Tale of the Buddha (2 page)

Long condemned as an idol known by many names, the Buddha would, through the work of scholars like Eugène Burnouf, be transformed into a philosopher—a teacher of ethics who revealed the path to enlightenment to all who would follow it, regardless of their social class. In a Europe where the authority of the church was under attack, he was an Asian sage who had founded a religion that had no God, a religion that had no priests, a religion that was not a religion.

And so the head-spinning ironies abound. Islam, long (although wrongly) condemned for bringing about the demise of Buddhism in India, 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.

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.
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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 lingua franca of clerics in western Europe, and
Barlaam and Josaphat
was subsequently translated from Latin into the many vernacular versions that circulated in medieval Europe.

The Greek translation of the story was long thought to be the original version of the story, and the eighth-century theologian John of Damascus was thought to be its author. This attribution has been discredited by modern scholars, but many medieval translators—including Gui de Cambrai—identified John as the author of
Barlaam and Josaphat
, and the story's attachment to a well-known theologian could have been another reason for its popularity. Gui de Cambrai even makes John of Damascus a character in the story.

Gui de Cambrai translates his
Barlaam and Josaphat
from a Latin source, he tells us twice, at the request of his patron, Gilles de Marquais. Gui's name indicates that he was from Cambrai, in northern France, but we know little about him. He has also been identified as the author of
Le vengement Alixandre
(
The
Revenge of Alexander
), a continuation of the popular
Romance of Alexander
,
which recounts the vengeance taken by the vassals of Alexander the Great on the servants who poisoned their lord.
4
We assume that Gui was a cleric, since he knew Latin. He had literary skills, or at least literary pretensions, because he translated Latin prose into Old French verse, and his
Barlaam and Josaphat
is clearly written for a courtly audience: Gui addresses noblemen directly in many of his narratorial interventions in the text.

Several times Gui de Cambrai is also named in the third person as the author of the text. Such references may suggest that the text was read out loud to an audience by a minstrel or a professional performer, and in fact the text includes many asides to the audience that could suggest that it was read to, or performed for, an audience. Some scholars have claimed that Gui de Cambrai left his translation unfinished, and that it was completed by an unnamed compiler who may have emphasized Gui's authorship as he added the extensive social commentary to the text. It is also possible that Gui names himself in the narrative, since it was not unusual for medieval authors to refer to themselves in the third person in order to claim authorship of a text and even to vaunt their rhetorical skills. And indeed other scholars insist that the entire narrative was written by Gui, including the narratorial interjections that explain the story, condemn the vices of the nobility, lament the corruption of the church, and excoriate those who have failed to go on Crusades to win Jerusalem from the Muslims.
5

Gui's perspective is resolutely Christian: he speaks of “our Lord” and “our religion,” and he vilifies Jews and Muslims as pagans. As in other medieval texts, Jews come in for special blame for their failure to recognize Christ when their prophets foretold his coming. Muslims are described as idolaters, like the Chaldeans, Greeks, and Egyptians whose religions are also refuted in
Barlaam and Josaphat.
“Idolater” is a fairly common term of abuse for Muslims in medieval narratives, despite the fact that Islam forbids the representation of living beings and especially of God and his prophets. The characterization of Muslims as idolaters reveals the limited knowledge about Islam among medieval Christians, and indeed accusations of idol worship were used to condemn almost anyone who was not a Christian. “Saracen,” the name commonly used for Muslims in medieval French texts, also comes to have the fairly general sense of “pagan,” and in
Barlaam and Josaphat
it appears frequently as an alternative name for Indians.

Gui de Cambrai's
Barlaam and Josaphat
includes two unique additions to the story of Prince Josaphat. First, Gui includes a holy war in his story. In most versions, after King Avenir divides his kingdom and gives half to his son, he sees the prosperity of 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 have been read aloud to an audience, but it is most certainly a translation from a written source, as the narrator claims, and not transcribed from an oral performance. However, it does, as mentioned, preserve many interventions from the narrator that directly address an audience. I have placed the narrator's shorter interruptions in parentheses. Longer interventions, sometimes in the third person, are signaled in the notes. Unless specifically addressing women (usually to chastise them), the text uses masculine pronouns to describe Christian subjects, and I have preserved the use of masculine pronouns instead of gender-neutral identifications, to reflect both the Old French usage and the text's perspective. Apart from a few mentions of women devoted to God in the parables Barlaam recounts, women in
Barlaam and Josaphat
represent seductions of the world that lead to the loss of the soul, and the lessons of the story are explicitly addressed to men.

The translation follows Carl Appel's 1907 edition based on two manuscripts.
7
Appel identifies some short lacunae in his edition, but I have not marked these in the translation; I have filled in the lines where the meaning seemed obvious, and I have simply skipped over several missing lines and inserted a transition. I have also added chapter divisions to the Old French text. Gui's
Barlaam and Josaphat
, like the Greek and all subsequent versions, is full of Biblical allusions, citations, and paraphrases, which I have not attempted to document.

PEGGY MCCRACKEN

Matthias Meyer and Constanza Cordoni first drew my attention to
Barlaam and Josaphat.
Inspired by an international conference they organized, my colleague Donald Lopez and I cowrote a book,
In Search of the Christian Buddha
, while I was translating Gui's narrative. That collaboration made the translation all the more interesting and rewarding, and I am very grateful for our many conversations about the text and for Don's encouragement to take on the translation in the first place. Doug Anderson now knows more about
Barlaam
than he ever imagined he could bear, I am sure, and I could never have completed this project without his good humor, unfailing support, and willingness to help me translate chess metaphors.