The Buddha's Journey to the West: Barlaam and Josaphat in the Eurasian Linguistic Context

Barlaam and Josaphat (BJ) is the epitome of pre-modern transcultural, interreligious, cross-linguistic phenomena that took place on the Eurasian continent and beyond. BJ is a collection of the Buddha's life stories originating in India that have circulated widely in the medieval Middle East and Europe. The stories are a syncretic version of the Buddha's biography extracted from Aśvaghoṣa's Buddhacarita, the Lalitavistara, the Mahāvastu, and the Jātaka tales, which are preserved in the Sanskrit, Pali, Tibetan, and Chinese Buddhist canon. BJ was presumably translated from Indic first into a now-lost Manichaean Middle Iranian version, which was later translated into Arabic.

When BJ was introduced to the Islamic and Christian world, it enjoyed great literary success and popularity. Translations and reworks of BJ have survived in Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Greek, and Latin, and languages of the Christian Orient (Armenian, Georgian, Gəʾəz). From the Latin version BJ was translated into most medieval European languages: Old French, Old Catalan, Old High German, Old English, Old Norse, Old Church Slavonic, etc. The "Tale of the Caskets", a story in BJ, has even made its way into Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. BJ gained so much popularity in the Christian world that both Saint Barlaam and Saint Josaphat were incorporated into the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Western Catholic Church.

When Jesuit missionaries arrived in China and Japan in the 16th century, they brought the story of Saint Barlaam and Saint Josaphat along and translated these into early modern Chinese and Japanese, creating cultural "doublets" of the Buddha's biography in Asia: a medieval Buddhist version from India and a Christian retelling in the early modern era.

My dissertation project will (1) establish a synoptic edition of core translations of BJ's transmission to the west (Arabic, Georgian, Greek) and search for their parallels in the Sanskrit, Pali, Chinese, and Tibetan Buddhist canon; (2) observe how key Buddhist proper names, terminology, phraseology, and narrative devices are transformed linguistically and culturally in the process of translation from Central Asia to Europe and eventually to East Asia; (3) examine what elements from external sources (e.g. the Bible, Quran, Arabic literature, Christian hagiography, etc.) are added to the stories; (4) contextualize each translation in their own historical, geographical, and cultural context in the history of Byzantian, Georgian, and Arabic literature.