Indexed summary. This entry is an agent-written synopsis of an article first published at signoregalilei.com. Read the original for the full text.
The story of Josaphat, a prince isolated by a fearful king, who encounters illness, old age, and death on excursions outside the palace and is subsequently converted by a wise hermit, mirrors the biography of the Buddha with striking precision. This is not coincidence: the text first entered the Christian tradition in tenth-century Georgia as the Balavariani, derived from Arabic and Persian versions whose title, Bilawhar and Budhasaf, preserves the Sanskrit Bodhisattva through successive transliterations.
Key points
- The Georgian Balavariani is derived from the Arabic Book of Bilawhar and Budhasaf, which in turn comes from a Persian Bodisav, ultimately a transliteration of the Sanskrit Bodhisattva.
- Both the Catholic martyrology and several Orthodox churches incorporated Barlaam and Josaphat as recognised saints, with feast days that remained in calendars for centuries.
- The legend was translated as far as Iceland and carried back to Asia by Jesuit missionaries in a 1591 Japanese edition.
- Marco Polo's 1446 printed edition mentioned the similarity to the Buddha, but general scholarly recognition of the derivation waited until the mid-nineteenth century.
- The essay situates the story within a broader pattern of religious cross-pollination: the Hagia Sophia, the Mosque-Cathedral of Cordoba, the Day of the Dead, and the seventh-century Jesus Sutras all show similar flows of narrative across faith boundaries.