In Search of the Christian Buddha: How an Asian Sage Became a Medieval Saint

The Buddha, of course, never became a Christian saint—Medieval Christians knew nothing about him, and he died in faraway India some 380 years before the Common Era. A story about the Buddha became Christianized, though, passing from one religious community to another, being revised and added to as it went, or having elements removed for various reasons. In outline, this is the process described by Lopez (Buddhist and Tibetan Studies; coauthor, The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism) and McCracken (French literature, both, Univ. of Michigan; Barlaam and Josaphat). Islamic writers picked up the story of a great ascetic sage; next, Christian Georgian monks in Palestine adopted the story; it was then picked up by Greek monks and soon by Latin ones. In the Medieval West the story became known as Barlaam and Josaphat, and several versions of it were extant. Nobody in the Middle Ages, whether Muslim, Christian, or Jew, realized the stories were derived from a legend about the Buddha and it's taken many scholars until now to piece the whole narrative tradition together. While too thorough and detailed for the casual reader, this book will appeal to scholars of literary and religious history.