For about a thousand years, the Buddha was revered as a Christian saint. From the eighth century onward, the legend of St. Josaphat, as the Buddha was known, was told and retold throughout the Christian East, Africa, Europe, and Britain. The story of the Buddha was greatly beloved by all kinds of Christians, from peasants to popes. Feast days dedicated to St. Josaphat, along with his spiritual teacher, who was called St. Barlaam, were included in the calendars of the Catholic, Greek Orthodox, and Eastern Orthodox churches. He and his teacher were celebrated with loving devotion and joy.
How could this be? And what meaning can it have for us? This ancient Saint Josaphat (another was named in the seventeenth century) seems to have been the end result of a long, fascinating game of telephone. In the telephone game, which most of us have played as children, a word or phrase–the more unusual or complicated the better–is whispered by one person to another until it emerges at the end of a chain of whispers altered in an unexpected and funny way. Laughter usually ensues, and a lesson follows: what we hear isn’t necessarily what was originally said. At some point, an adult will feel the need to spoil the fun by soberly reminding the tickled kids that this is how misunderstanding and gossip spreads.
The kids usually aren’t reminded that the transformation that comes with transmission can work a kind of magic. Everything we experience is filtered through the netting of our culture and conditioning. Transmitting religious ideas from country to country works a kind of alchemy, creating new alloys, adding layers of meaning. As the way of the Buddha and his enlightenment spread, it was expressed in new languages and forms. The vast cosmology and intricate philosophy of Sanskrit and Tibetan Buddhism became the poetic simplicity of Chan in China, Zen in Japan. Buddhism was–and is–adept at assimilating, incorporating the indigenous traditions of the cultures where it took root. In our own culture, the insights of the Buddha and especially the practice of mindfulness are often melded with the language and concepts of Western psychology and neuroscience.
But the shape-shifting of Buddha into Saint Josaphat was something else. The story of the Buddha seemed to vanish and reappear in Christian form. Scholars believe that a Sanskrit Mahayana Buddhist manuscript from the second to fourth century made its way east to China, and then west along that ancient trade route of goods and ideas known as the Silk Road. The story of the bodhisattva, the man who left a palace to gain enlightenment, struck a chord with the Manichees in Persia, and their Manichean version of the text was translated into an Arabic text. By 800 or 900 A.D. a Christianized version appeared in Georgian.
That version was translated into Greek and Latin, and from there, it caught fire. Versions of the tale appeared in French, Spanish, Armenian, Hebrew, Dutch, Icelandic, German, on and on. In the academic online journal The Conversation, Philip C. Almond, emeritus professor in the history of religious thought at the University of Queensland, writes that from the eleventh century onwards, the story of St. Josephat and his teacher St. Barlaam was more popular than any other legend. It was available in over sixty versions in the main languages of Europe, the Christian East, and Africa. Included among these texts was William Caxton’s 1483 English version of The Golden Legend, a popular collection of lives of the saints. There were several English versions of Saint Josaphat’s story, and one is the source of an anecdote that made its way into Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice—suitor asked to choose between three caskets chooses the lead of true commitment to love over the vain and greedy values of gold and silver.
What are we to make of this? Professor Almond rightfully sees this beloved story as proof of the influence Buddhism has had on the West. A thousand years before “mindfulness” became part of our vocabulary and daily lives, Western Christian culture cherished a man who gave up gold and silver to choose an ascetic path. His life was even used to defend Catholic monasticism during the Protestant Reformation.
But there is more to be seen. This story was welcomed as if it was already familiar. Long ago in India, a son was born to a king. This king was overjoyed at the birth of an heir but all too soon his happiness was shadowed by a troubling prophecy. An astrologer predicted that this child might choose a spiritual path, forsaking the pleasure and power that ruled his father’s world. The story drew people into a new understanding, but it was as if the melody was known deep in the bones.
To prevent his son from leaving, the king made his palace stronghold a luxurious prison, designed to shield the boy from the harsh truths of life, sickness, old age, and death. He surrounded his son with beautiful distractions that were updated as the boy grew older. But the young man found ways to escape the palace, and outside he glimpsed a blind man, a sick man, the reality of death and loss in its many guises. The shock he experienced rocked his world. He was in turmoil, burning to find a way to be in a world that was characterized by perpetual loss and change.
Those of us who know the story of Siddhartha Gautama, the Indian prince who became the Buddha, think we know what comes next. But here come strange differences. In this telling the ancient king is named Abenner, not Suddhodana. He is a proud man, devoted to pleasure, but he is portrayed as a pagan who persecuted the members of a Christian Church in his realm that was founded by the Apostle Thomas. (The Buddha, who was born in what is now Nepal, lived roughly five-hundred years before Jesus of Nazareth.)
In the midst of his spiritual crisis, Josephat meets Barlaam, a spiritual teacher from Sri Lanka. Some scholars believe that both names derive from the Sanskrit word bodhisattva, a being on the path to awakening. It was as if the Buddha was meeting himself in a more mature, more awakened state. In this version, however, Barlaam teaches Josephat about Christ, encouraging him to convert and live an ascetic Christian life.
Like Siddhartha’s father before him, Josephat’s father tries to sway his son from his quest and his destiny with beautiful maidens, offering every temptation. But Josephat, like Siddhartha, cannot be tempted. Here versions vary. According to Professor Almond, Josephat goes in search of Barlaam in Sri Lanka, after his father’s death. He joins him in the mountains. In other accounts, Abenner himself is converted to Christianity. He abdicates his kingdom to his son and lives out his days as a hermit monk in the desert. Saint Josephat in turn gives up this worldly kingdom for a life of holy simplicity with his beloved teacher.
Despite the big changes in the story of Siddhartha, and despite the differences between various Christianized versions, a universal truth shines out. Life hurts. No matter how rich we are–no matter how zealously we pursue pleasure and avoid pain–suffering will find us. We will encounter change and loss in many forms, and ultimately death. For some of us, the impermanent nature of life is so haunting it impels us to seek answers beyond our own defenses. Both Siddhartha and his Christian double Josephat ventured beyond the palace walls. Out in the world, they both encountered sickness, aging, mortality. In his article in The Conversation, “How the Buddha Became a Christian Saint,” Professor Almond quotes Josephat telling us there was no going back: “No longer is there any sweetness in this transitory life now that I have seen these things…Gradual and sudden death are in league together.”
Both the Buddha and the saint discovered that real happiness is possible in this changing world. Peace and freedom wait for us outside the isolated little kingdoms of our anxious and defended lives. Both the Buddha and Saint Josaphat found a new life, a holy life, that was simple and direct. They surrendered their supposed riches, their status, and their stories to live in the light of a greater truth.
What is extraordinary is how ordinary this story is. What captivated Christians about the Buddha for a thousand years were not the many tales of magic and supernatural powers but a story about being willing to live in humble simplicity, open to reality. From his birth, the life of Siddhartha Gautama was full of evidence of special psychic powers and miraculous events. He always emphasized the magic of the Path, proclaiming that compared to it special states and miracles were mere magic tricks. Based on his story, Sain Josaphat agreed.
But miraculous events did abound in Siddhartha’s life. It is said that the moment he was born he rose and took seven steps and spoke, proclaiming that this would be his last birth. Wherever he stepped a lotus bloomed. As a boy, he was taken by the king to a nearby village to watch a plowing festival. Left alone under a tree when his nannies thought he was sleeping, the little prince sat up and took in his first impressions of the co-existence of joy and suffering–the joy of a beautiful day and peaceful, mindful solitude, the suffering of the laboring men and oxen, of the plowed-up worms and insects carried away and eaten by birds.
All day long as the boy sat and observed (in some accounts he slept), a shadow cast by the tree sheltered him. Miraculously, even as the sun moved, the shadow never moved. When Siddhartha left home to seek enlightenment, he took off his princely robes and ornaments. He also cut his long hair, tossing his hair knot into the air, asking the universe to not let it fall if he was indeed to become a Buddha. It never fell. After he abandoned ascetic practice to meditate and seek insight on his own, he accepted a meal of rice pudding from a village girl named Sujata. When he finished eating, he hurled the bowl into the river, asking that it flow upstream if he was to attain enlightenment. It flowed upstream.
After the Buddha attained enlightenment, these auspicious miraculous events were accompanied by tales of his extraordinary psychic powers, cultivated during meditation. While it was (and is) considered unskillful and unseemly to flaunt such capacities, stories of the Buddha’s telepathy and ability to levitate and teleport and more are cherished in the literature. From the moment he returned to Kapilivastu, his home kingdom, after his enlightenment, people witnessed the Buddha levitating and making it rain or, in the case of a famous teaching in Savatti, making jeweled walkways in the air and cosmic light shows that included duplicates of himself in different poses. He subdued great serpents and drunken elephants, and outran a monstrous killer, Anguilmala, while walking slowly and calmly (in some versions of that story the Buddha is stretching the earth to maintain distance).
The list of marvels attributed to the Buddha is long and vivid. Yet none of that makes its way into the story of Saint Josephat. One explanation is that the manuscript that made its way along the Silk into receptive hands simply didn’t include such things. Another possibility is that what proved indelible was what was most relatable. The real magic in the story of Siddhartha and Josaphat consisted in their breaking free and finding a way to live with that peace and freedom in a real world.
It is a wondrous feat that the bodhisattva was worshiped as a Christian saint for so long, but there was a kind of curious time lag at play. Until the nineteenth century, Buddhism wasn’t known as a distinct religion in the West. There were just glimpses of an extraordinary being. One of the manuscripts of the man we know as Marco Polo includes a description of “Sakyamuni Burkham” (his rendering of Shakyamuni Buddha), a saintly being who lived a good and pure life. Indeed Marco and at least one other translator of his manuscripts wrote of the remarkable similarity between this man and Saint Josephat.
Even as Buddhist teachings were translated and became known they were often misunderstood–even by brilliant thinkers, and even by Pope John Paul II, who is now a canonized saint himself. The Buddha’s enlightenment struck the late pontiff and many Christians as morbid, based on a realization that the world was evil and a source of suffering. Yet in his collection of essays, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, Pope John Paul describes the Buddha as negative, characterized by “indifference with regard to the world.” The detachment from worldly identification and the humble way of living that inspired the legend of Saint Josaphat described apparently seemed to him and other Christian interpreters to be a deadening separation from life. The Buddha and his teaching seemed to lack all appreciation of the goodness of God and creation, and his great insight into non-separation seemed the very opposite of the generosity of Jesus Christ, who offers himself without beginning or end.
There were always exceptions. Meister Eckhart, Hildegard of Bingen, and other great mystics share insights that resonate deeply with the great insights of the Buddha. Many contemporary Christian thinkers, including the Trappist monk and author Thomas Merton, the Jesuit priest and Zen Roshi Robert Kennedy, and others have written with profundity and appreciation about the kinship between Buddhism and Christianity. Pope Francis has compared the work of Buddha and Jesus, both of them seeking to cultivate goodness by helping people escape from the cruel, separating little prisons of our egoism.
To be sure, there have always been plenty of Buddhists who see Christianity through a similarly biased lens–the current 14th Dalai Lama has ventured that Jesus Christ probably evolved over many lifetimes. As the saying goes, we don’t see people and things not as they are but as we are. But still, there are stories that slip through the net of our conditioning. At least, in the depths of the so-called “Dark Ages,” in the story of Saint Josephat, something very enlightened was understood.
To find the self, forget yourself, taught the great medieval Zen sage Dogen. Forget all your limiting stories and beliefs about who you are. Leave the little fortress of your defenses. Let go of riches and titles and come out into the open. Remember that you are part of life, not separate. Look, listen, sense, experience how it feels to be alive and part of great creation in this very moment, right here, right now. There is no greater magic than this.
We are heavily defended creatures. We can’t help this. We are wired this way. Healthy cells defend themselves against invaders. The ego defends us against psychic pain, and this too is natural. And yet we also long to connect with others and with life, to know and be known, to love and be loved. And we have learned by now that our defenses tend to be a little overactive. Once upon a time, we remember, we were open and loving and downright playful. We were radiant little babies. But thanks to myriad encounters during our time on earth, most of us have acquired a kind of psychic autoimmune disease. We get so triggered and so often consumed with our various defenses that we find ourselves mired in painful isolation that feels so much worse than the vulnerability we fear. What can help?
Attention. Hold everything that arises, including your trickiest defenses, in the light of a gentle, curious attention. Insight and freedom will come. It can feel like digging your way out of prison with a teaspoon, but just keep digging. Freedom will come. ◆
This piece is excerpted from the Fall 2024 issue of Parabola, THE WAY OF MAGIC. You can find the full issue on our online store.
