As I Was Travelling In The Isle Of
Salsette, And Went To See That Rare And Admirable Pagoda (Which We Call
The Canara Pagoda[6]) Made In A Mountain, With Many Halls Cut Out Of One
Solid Rock ...
And enquiring from this old man about the work, and what he
thought as to who had made it, he told us that without doubt the work was
made by order of the father of St. Josaphat to bring him up therein in
seclusion, as the story tells.
And as it informs us that he was the son of
a great King in India, it may well be, as we have just said, that he was
the Budao, of whom they relate such marvels." (Dec. V. liv. vi. cap. 2.)
Dominie Valentyn, not being well read in the Golden Legend, remarks on the
subject of Buddha: "There be some who hold this Budhum for a fugitive
Syrian Jew, or for an Israelite, others who hold him for a Disciple of the
Apostle Thomas; but how in that case he could have been born 622 years
before Christ I leave them to explain. Diego de Couto stands by the belief
that he was certainly Joshua, which is still more absurd!" (V. deel, p.
374.)
[Since the days of Couto, who considered the Buddhist legend but an
imitation of the Christian legend, the identity of the stories was
recognised (as mentioned supra) by M. Edouard Laboulaye, in the Journal
des Debats of the 26th of July, 1859. About the same time, Professor F.
Liebrecht of Liege, in Ebert's Jahrbuch fuer Romanische und Englische
Literatur, II. p. 314 seqq., comparing the Book of Barlaam and Joasaph
with the work of Barthelemy St. Hilaire on Buddha, arrived at the same
conclusion.
In 1880, Professor T.W. Rhys Davids has devoted some pages (xxxvi.-xli.)
in his Buddhist Birth Stories; or, Jataka Tales, to The Barlaam and
Josaphat Literature, and we note from them that: "Pope Sixtus the Fifth
(1585-1590) authorised a particular Martyrologium, drawn up by Cardinal
Baronius, to be used throughout the Western Church.". In that work are
included not only the saints first canonised at Rome, but all those who,
having been already canonised elsewhere, were then acknowledged by the
Pope and the College of Rites to be saints of the Catholic Church of
Christ. Among such, under the date of the 27th of November, are included
"The holy Saints Barlaam and Josaphat, of India, on the borders of Persia,
whose wonderful acts Saint John of Damascus has described. Where and when
they were first canonised, I have been unable, in spite of much
investigation, to ascertain. Petrus de Natalibus, who was Bishop of
Equilium, the modern Jesolo, near Venice, from 1370 to 1400, wrote a
Martyrology called Catalogus Sanctorum; and in it, among the 'Saints,'
he inserts both Barlaam and Josaphat, giving also a short account of them
derived from the old Latin translation of St. John of Damascus. It is from
this work that Baronius, the compiler of the authorised Martyrology now in
use, took over the names of these two saints, Barlaam and Josaphat. But,
so far as I have been able to ascertain, they do not occur in any
martyrologies or lists of saints of the Western Church older than that of
Petrus de Natalibus. In the corresponding manual of worship still used in
the Greek Church, however, we find, under 26th August, the name 'of the
holy Iosaph, son of Abener, King of India.' Barlaam is not mentioned, and
is not therefore recognised as a saint in the Greek Church. No history is
added to the simple statement I have quoted; and I do not know on what
authority it rests. But there is no doubt that it is in the East, and
probably among the records of the ancient church of Syria, that a final
solution of this question should be sought. Some of the more learned of
the numerous writers who translated or composed new works on the basis of
the story of Josaphat, have pointed out in their notes that he had been
canonised; and the hero of the romance is usually called St. Josaphat in
the titles of these works, as will be seen from the Table of the Josaphat
literature below. But Professor Liebrecht, when identifying Josaphat with
the Buddha, took no notice of this; and it was Professor Max Mueller, who
has done so much to infuse the glow of life into the dry bones of Oriental
scholarship, who first pointed out the strange fact - almost incredible,
were it not for the completeness of the proof - that Gotama the Buddha,
under the name of St. Josaphat, is now officially recognised and honoured
and worshipped throughout the whole of Catholic Christendom as a Christian
saint!" Professor T.W. Rhys Davids gives further a Bibliography, pp.
xcv.-xcvii.
M.H. Zotenberg wrote a learned memoir (N. et Ext. XXVIII. Pt. I.) in
1886 to prove that the Greek Text is not a translation but the original of
the Legend. There are many MSS. of the Greek Text of the Book of Barlaam
and Joasaph in Paris, Vienna, Munich, etc., including ten MSS. kept in
various libraries at Oxford. New researches made by Professor E. Kuhn, of
Munich (Barlaam und Joasaph. Eine Bibliographisch-literargeschichtliche
Studie, 1893), seem to prove that during the 6th century, in that part of
the Sassanian Empire bordering on India, in fact Afghanistan, Buddhism and
Christianity were gaining ground at the expense of the Zoroastrian faith,
and that some Buddhist wrote in Pehlevi a Book of Yudasaf (Bodhisatva); a
Christian, finding pleasant the legend, made an adaptation of it from his
own point of view, introducing the character of the monk Balauhar (Barlaam)
to teach his religion to Yudasaf, who could not, in his Christian disguise,
arrive at the truth by himself like a Bodhisatva. This Pehlevi version of
the newly-formed Christian legend was translated into Syriac, and from
Syriac was drawn a Georgian version, and, in the first half of the 7th
century, the Greek Text of John, a monk of the convent of St. Saba, near
Jerusalem, by some turned into St. John of Damascus, who added to the story
some long theological discussions.
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