The Byzantine Life of the Buddha

This paper sheds light on the evolution of the narrative nucleus of the life of Buddha from Eastern versions to the Georgian Christianisation, formalisation, and authorial attribution of the Byzantine era up to the success of the Story of Barlaam and Joasaphand its apologists in the modern age. What emerges is a “philological novel” that reveals how the study of textual tradition can touch the heart of cultural exchange and, in this case, illuminate the intricate relations between East and West in the syncretic linguistic, cultural, and religious crucible that was Byzantium. Original source of all of the Christianised stories of Buddha and ultimate mediator of earlier Buddhist, Persian, Arabic, and Georgian versions, this 10th century Byzantine text, presents a uniquely cosmopolitan DNA, resulting in a fascinating genesis between the Caucasus and Mount Athos. The Story of Barlaam and Joasaph recounts the tale of an Indian prince who, influenced by the teachings of an anchorite, flees the palace where his father has imprisoned him to protect him from the evils of the world, abandons his royal destiny, and sets off on his own mystical-hermetic journey. That the story mirrored that of the Buddha was recognised by scholars already at the end of the 19th century, but the various stages and mediations were unravelled definitively only in recent years. It is now possible to fully appreciate both the true narrative qualities of the text and the allusive, philosophical richness of the various trajectories of the story, which have fascinated and influenced scores of writers over the centuries from Jacobus de Voragine to Gui de Cambrai and Boccaccio, Shakespeare to Lope de Vega and Calderón de la Barca, Tolstoy to Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Hermann Hesse.