One of the best known examples of the hagiographic novel, this is
the tale of an Indian prince who becomes aware of the world's
miseries and is converted to Christianity by the monk Barlaam.
Barlaam and Josaphat (Ioasaph) were believed to have re-converted
India after her lapse from conversion to Christianity, and they
were numbered among the Christian saints. Centuries ago likenesses
were noticed between the life of Josaphat and the life of the
Buddha; the resemblances are in incidents, doctrine, and
philosophy, and Barlaam's rules of abstinence resemble the Buddhist
monk's. But not till the mid-nineteenth century was it recognised
that, in Josaphat, the Buddha had been venerated as a Christian
saint for about a thousand years.
The origin of the story of Barlaam and Ioasaph--which in itself
has little peculiar to Buddhism--appears to be a Manichaean tract
produced in Central Asia. It was welcomed by the Arabs and by the
Georgians. The Greek romance of Barlaam appears separately first in
the 11th century. Most of the Greek manuscripts attribute the story
to John the Monk, and it is only some later scribes who identify
this John with John Damascene (ca. 676-749). There is strong
evidence in Latin and Georgian as well as Greek that it was the
Georgian Euthymius (who died in 1028) who caused the story to be
translated from Georgian into Greek, the whole being reshaped and
supplemented. The Greek romance soon spread throughout Christendom,
and was translated into Latin, Old Slavonic, Armenian, and Arabic.
An English version (from Latin) was used by Shakespeare in his
caskets scene in "The Merchant of Venice,"
David M. Lang's Introduction traces parallels between the
Buddhist andChristian legends, discusses the importance of Arabic
versions, and notes influences of the Manichaean creed.
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