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The Lesson and the Letter

Historical-critical scrutiny of the legends of the saints, like critical study of the Bible, is a recent phenomenon. For many centuries the religious authorities seemed unable to distinguish between respectful loyalty to sacred texts and their teachings on the one hand and the historical factuality of their narratives on the other. Even today it is possible without too much difficulty to find people who misunderstand the nature of gospel parables, demanding that even they be taken literally. But most even of fundamentalists have gotten beyond that childlike literalism. Will the day come when they no longer recoil at historical criticism as if it were a hostile assault on the text? For it is not. Even hostile polemicist Robert Green Ingersoll (The Mistakes of Moses) made it clear that he bore no hostility toward the Bible, a wonderful ancient book like the Iliad and the Odyssey. His sarcastic dissections of scripture were merely the needful counterweight to those who would inflate proper veneration for the Bible into idolatry by christening the book infallible and inerrant. Today most critics (i.e., students, analysts) of the Bible find that a critical approach, stemming from the recognition that the texts are usually not factual in nature, opens up new riches in the texts, enabling us to see what the blinders of biblical literalism had concealed from us. The same is true of the legends of the saints, which appear to most readers as grotesque or comical in their pious extravagance. In their pages, religion and superstition interpenetrate in astonishing ways. How can we not smile, even guffaw, when we read the pious chronicle of Saint Wilgefortis, a beautiful girl who so prized her chastity that she asked God to repel her many suitors, a prayer he answered by causing her to sprout a full beard overnight!

But surely the most remarkable and important saint-legend is that of Saint Iodasaph, the hero of a preachy novel of sorts that made the rounds of the ancient world in many languages including Greek, Latin (three different versions), Armenian, Arabic, Ghe'ez (pre-Coptic Ethiopian), Old Slavonic, Russian, Bielorussian, Serb, French, Occitan, Anglo-Norman, High German, and Norse. The oldest known fragments of any version of the tale are written in Turkomen. But the most famous version is the eleventh-century Greek Barlaam and Ioasaph credited to St. John of Damascus, though some now ascribe it to St. Euthymius the Georgian instead.

Divine Deja Vu

The scene is India or Ethiopia (which the ancients had trouble distinguishing!). There are actually some genuine African Ethiopian place names in the text, but the story seems to intend Asian India, where the Christian faith once planted by Judas Didymus Thomas, the apostle of Jesus Christ (as we read in The Acts of Thomas), has withered away. Its remnants are suffering persecution at the hands of a polytheistic wastrel of a king. The king has a strange dream which prompts him to consult an astrologer, who informs him that he will have a son who is destined to become a great king or to convert, after tasting of sorrow, to an outlawed sect and there attain other-worldly greatness. The latter possibility the king attempts to forestall. When his son is born, he arranges that the lad shall never leave the royal grounds, and that within he shall never experience sorrow. But years later, the young prince manages to leave the city briefly, and then he sees a sick man, an old man, and a corpse, three sights that speak eloquently of the sorrow shadowing the whole world.

Soon thereafter, the prince encounters a Christian monk, Barlaam of Senaar (elsewhere called Balahver of Serendip), who has managed to preserve the interdicted Christian faith. He catechizes the prince at great length (the redactor has incorporated an eighth-century work of Christian apologetics attributed to John of Damascus, hence perhaps the eventual ascription of the whole work to him). And though he does take the throne for a brief time, he finally embraces the monastic life as a Christian (though some versions substituted the faith of the lands the story circulated in: Judaism, Islam, or Manicheism). In the Greek version, Iodasaph is responsible for restoring Christianity to India.

There is nothing all that unusual or implausible about the basic story, that of a wealthy prince who renounced his luxury once he became aware of the suffering of the peasants and went forth to try to ameliorate it. It is basically the same story of St. Francis of Assisi, who did the same thing, as a matter of historical fact. What is so remarkable about the case of Iodasaph, whose feast day is still observed on November 27, is that the story is actually that of Prince Siddhartha, or Gautama Buddha. In the many traditional tellings of his story, the prince is called "the Bodhisattva" (literally "enlightenment-being," but denoting "Buddha-in-training") until that point in the narrative when enlightenment strikes like lightning, kindling the light of the world. From then on he is called "the Buddha," the Enlightened One. So it was as "the Bodhisattva" that Prince Siddhartha renounced wealth and sought salvation.

And as this great story percolated around the ancient East, translated from one tongue to another, the title Bodhisattva ("Budhasaf" in Persian) was transfigured into other forms such as Ioasaph, Josaphat (cf. Jehoshaphat in 1 Kings chapter 22), Yudasaf, and Iodasaph. It could be understood as a Hebrew name, as Hugh J. Schonfield understood it in his book The Essene Odyssey: "Yodh-Asaph." But the parallels between the stories of Iodasaph and the Bodhisattva make it clear they are one and the same. We are here not dealing with a case of mysterious and spontaneous parallelism as we sometimes discover between, say, the Flood myths of far-separated cultures. This one is very evidently a case of diffusion. The Buddhist tale reached the West and took root. The Bodhisattva became Saint Iodasaph, and so he remains. And right here, just this is the astonishing enigma. Gautama the Buddha, founder of the Buddhist faith, has been canonized by the Roman Catholic Church as one of her saints! Most of those few who have taken any notice of the strange fact have merely smiled at the irony, but I want to suggest that what we have here is a serendipitous case of intertextual alchemy, a chance combination of chemicals to transmute the lead of religious intolerance and isolation into the gold of theological cross-fertilization and hybridization. The fact is, however it came to pass (in the mysterious providence of God?), the Buddha is a Christian saint!

More Than Mistaken Identity

This means the road was long ago opened for a path that Christians and Buddhists may walk together, hand in hand, even within a single heart, as Thomas Merton did. It is a path that Buddhists and Hindus have been treading already for a long time without us, for some among their number long ago decided that Jesus of Nazareth was an avatar of the Highest, just like Rama and Krishna, or that he was a Buddha or Bodhisattva. Given the close similarity between the doctrines and stories of Jesus in Christianity with those related of their own heroes and saviors, how could they have come to any other conclusion?

Though the final step of identification of Iodasaph as a Christian was unwitting, the whole thing rests on an ancient and impressive foundation which, so to speak, fortuitously came to light once the "mistake" was made. For how did a Buddhist tale manage to travel so widely into the West? It was carried by Manicheans who spanned the Middle East and Turkestan in the sixth century. Theirs was a form of Gnosticism created by the Apostle Mani in third-century Persia. Mani proclaimed himself the latest avatar of the same Spirit that had previously appeared on earth as the Prophet Zoroaster, Gautama the Buddha, and Jesus the Christ. His message was fantastically successful and created a world religion that lasted a full millennium, though it is dead now. He did not avoid making enemies, and in the end Mani was crucified, skinned alive, and burnt.

You see, Mani's doctrine was already syncretic, melding together elements of previous religions on the assumption that the great faith communities must all, as Paul Tillich said, have grown out of genuine revelatory experiences. And that means, as C.S. Lewis ventured in The Screwtape Letters, all the great founders had been sent from the same divine Source. The same doctrine of progressive revelation had already enabled Ebionite, Jewish Christianity of the second century to teach that Jesus Christ was the latest incarnation of the True Prophet who had first been incarnated in/as Adam, the father of the human race. The prediction of the Paraclete, a figure to follow Jesus and expound the esoteric import of his message to a subsequent generation of his followers (John 14:15-17; 16:12-15), partakes of the same stream of thought. The Prophet Muhammad was conversant with the same prophetology, and something like this is implied when he announced himself the Seal of the Prophets. After his own departure, later Muslim sectarians, especially the Shi'ites, posited a succession of divinely inspired imams (teachers) descended from the Prophet and able to reveal the true meaning of his oracles. In Egypt, the Ismail'i Shi'ites came to believe that their Fatimid caliphs were themselves extensions of this chain, either divinely inspired guides or else actual incarnations of Allah. This Ismail'i esotericism gave birth in the eleventh century to the Druze faith. Similar developments in nineteenth-century Iran led to Ali Muhammad proclaiming himself the latest "Point" of divine manifestation, the Hidden Imam or Qai'm or Mahdi, the final Imam descended from Muhammad. And yet, he said, after his passing, there should come others at intervals of several thousands of years, each to speak new truth suited to a new dispensation. After his passing, almost immediately, Hussein Ali announced himself as the fulfillment of this prophecy, albeit well before the appointed time. Taking the name Baha'ullah ("Glory of God"), he founded the Baha'i Faith. All these prophets considered themselves the heirs, even the reincarnations, of the great ancient founders, though only the Baha'is went so far as the Manicheans had, including the Buddha among their forbears.

The Dogwood and the Lotus

It is in such a context that we can see more fully what it really means for the Buddha to appear in the Christian calendar of saints. It is a vestige of Manicheism. It is a witness to the doctrine that the crashing waves of revelation all come from the same source. But, some may well ask, is this not rather easier said than demonstrated? Is the hybrid Buddhist-Christian saint after all a mule? Is it a sterile notion? Radical Christian theologians (Thomas J.J. Altizer, Don Cupitt) have for some time maintained that certain Buddhist doctrines, images, and ethics would solve various Christian problems better than traditional Christian resources could, and that certain tools in the Christian kit might facilitate Buddhist repairs. One might almost compare the situation to those daring surgeries where a human life is saved by a doctor's transplanting a new organ from a different animal species. For myself, I can only say that for many years I have been pleasantly amazed time after time to see how familiar New Testament texts made new sense when placed in the doctrinal context of Buddhism, like holding up a multifaceted gem to the light from a new angle. Again, when the contexts were so different for a notion or a mytheme that seemed readily to fit into both, it helped me to understand the differences between the two faiths better. What is common to them both somehow comes to serve as a measuring rod for each, gauging the distinctives of each all the better.

My task in this book is to try to demonstrate the potential of the promise of cross-fertilization of faiths that is bequeathed us in the Christian canonization of the Buddha. I want to cash the check, or to begin to do so. I believe that the best way to flesh out our premise, to make it more than an intriguing possibility, is to go back to the ancient way of setting forth spiritual truth: in parables, legends, fables and figures. Discursive theorizing, such as you have endured in this essay, can only get us in the mood, whet our appetite. It is talk that does not cook the rice. I think that to do that, we must try to regain the past and its more effective tools of communication. Hence these tales and sermons of the Buddha in the Bible, Saint Iodasaph.

Robert M. Price

June 14, 2003