Barlaam and Josaphat: A Christian Tale of the Buddha

by Gui de Cambrai

  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.

  Translator’s Preface

  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.1 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 Budhasaf 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 Ki
ng 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

  Acknowledgments

  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.

  The narrator’s introduction

  Whoever begins a task well and then finishes it well deserves a double reward. Suffering will be turned to joy for anyone who undertakes a good work and toils to ensure that it is well done. Blessed is a dolorous life when it leads to glory. (As this story will show, human glory is deceptive and of little worth.)1 Those who serve the devil do not understand what it means to serve God. They believe their sins will earn them more than the good man’s works. They are deceived. However, I do not wish to write a long prologue because I would rather begin the story of Josaphat and Avenir.

  This Avenir was king of India, and he did not tolerate any religion that challenged his authority. Because he was a sovereign king, he did not believe he should bow before any religion. That is how his story began, and he would never have turned to the good religion if God had revealed this reasoning to be false. (I began this story for Gilles of Marquais and his wife, Marie, so they could live better lives and be ready for their deaths.) Listen and you will hear how King Avenir chose heaven in the end.2

  In ancient times the good flourished, even though there was much evil in the world, but now evil has taken over and destroys all that is good. The things that used to be valued are neglected now. The logic of evil is compelling, and no one can avoid it. The people who used to thrive here and cultivate good deeds have all gone to other lands to seek better rewards, and they have left no goodness behind. Faith is corrupted. Sin has lit its forge, and the hammers and anvils are ready to shape all manner of transgressions. Sinners will suffer for it later, and yet no one will humble his heart to the good. Now I must turn to my story.

  King Avenir and his kingdom

  In early times, the holy church taught about God, and as the pagans learned more about him, they understood that they were lost. They saw that living without belief would destroy them, because after they died they would have nothing. The thing that most drew them to God was the Christians’ expectation of a good life after death.

  At the time when people first believed, there was a foolish king in India. He did not care about God or his power, since he believed that his knowledge and wealth came from other gods, and not from God the Creator. This king, called Avenir, took great pleasure in his reign and he was confident in his rule, for he believed that nothing could destroy or diminish him. He was greatly renowned, and his subjects served him willingly, but in serving their king they opposed the holy church.

  King Avenir vanquished all his foes, and he was wealthy, with many friends and fiefs, but his discernment was poor. He spent his tim
e pursuing pleasure and did not realize that his great power impoverished him. He was most rich and handsome, but as you know, gold is less prized when laid over tin; when enamel shows beneath the gold, the vessel has less value. Similarly, the king was fulfilled outside but empty inside. His body was full, but his soul was empty. The body enjoyed its pleasures, but the soul slept in a cruel bed. There was peril in these pleasures, and the body’s pleasure was tainted because it put the soul in sin. (At that time, as I understand it, the first growth of Christian belief flowered, and those who believed in God were strong in their faith. More learning, enlightenment, and veneration of the holy church was found in just one man than can be seen today in one hundred.)

  King Avenir took great delight in his reign, but his soul did not profit from the pleasures he pursued. And indeed, because he did not yet have a child, the king’s enjoyment of his privileges was lessened. (A child is a beloved thing! If children could remain with us always, there would be less to regret in the world.) This is what King Avenir and his thoughts were like.

  The Christians in Avenir’s lands did not fear the king’s laws or his prisons. The more the king persecuted them, the stronger their faith became. Their martyrdom was doubled since they willingly received death when the king demanded it, and they found victory in vanquishing the one who would vanquish them. King Avenir tested his earthly power against the Christians’ resolve, and his laws proved ineffective. The Christians did not fear pain or death, and all the king’s efforts were in vain. King Avenir was angered by his inability to overcome the Christians. He prepared new tortures and punishments for them. He threatened them with dolorous days and painful weeks, but they held their loyalty to God like a shield before the king’s attacks. The Holy Spirit who comforted them would destroy the king’s power.