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How the Buddha became a Catholic Saint
Anil Menon
The story of how the Buddha
became a Catholic saint is a story about an ancient Indian diaspora. Not the diaspora of a group of people but that of a collection of south-east Asian stories: the Jataka tales.
The Jataka tales have had a particularly strange journey. The word "jataka" means birth. The Jataka tales is a collection of fairy tales, riddles, parables, humorous moral tales and biographies all loosely centered around the previous lives of the Sakyamuni Buddha. Most of the approximately 550 stories in the Jataka tales have little to do with the Buddha. The Jataka tales were told long before they were written down. The tales were part of an oral tradition.
In the third or fourth century B.C., about three hundred years after the Buddha's death, the Jataka tales finally got written down. As the monks traveled, the Jataka stories traveled with them. The stories skipped languages, got translated, got adapted to local conditions and became native to many different cultures. In Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, for example, the Pardoner tells a Jataka story. Over half of La Fontaine's fables are actually from the Jataka tales.
Something very similar also happened to the Panchatantra (itself a secularized compendium of many Jataka tales). Arabic versions of the Panchatantra tales were set down in a manuscript called Kalilah and Dimnah (derived from Karataka and Damanaka, two recurring jackals in the Panchatantra stories). In the seventh and eight centuries A.D., Jewish merchants translated Kalilah and Dimnah into Greek and other European languages. The stories floated around in the collective Western consciousness until Planudes in the 14th century A.D. set them down as Aesop's Fables (no actual manuscript by Aesop has survived).
So widespread was the influence of these folktales from the Jataka and Panchatantra, that Joseph Jacobs (1854-1916), the famous folktale scholar and writer wrote:
... as to the source of the tales that are common to all European children ... increasing evidence seems to show that this common nucleus is derived from India and India alone .... So far as Europe has a common store of fairy tales, it owes this to India.
As Jacobs is careful to qualify, he is not claiming that every European fairy tale is from India; that's plainly ridiculous. But it seems the common stories, the stories that every child seems to know in Europe, can be traced back to tales that originally appeared in the Jataka or the Panchatantra.
What was it about these tales that made them so popular? I think it's the humor. It's of a special sort. In one of the tales, Buddha works as a security guard, and in another, a queen gets laughed at by fish. Yes, fish. The humor in these tales is often droll; Joseph Jacobs thought it was a characteristic of the South-Asian storyteller:
Can we go further and say that India is the source of all the incidents that are held in common by European children? I think we may answer "Yes" as regards droll incidents, the travels of many of which we can trace, and we have the curious result that European children owe their earliest laughter to Hindu wags.
Perhaps that's a bit much. Still, magic realism - whimsy's pretty new dress - is still very popular among South-East Asian writers.
At any rate, around the same time the Kalilah and Dimnah was being translated by the Jews, there lived a Christian monk called John of Damascus in the court of al-Walid ibn Abdul Malek, the Caliph of Baghdad. St. John was born around 676 A.D. and died sometime between 754 A.D and 757 A.D. He wrote a series of works defending the Christian faith. The Arabs, who ruled most of the world at the time, were very secure about Islam (seeing it as extension of Christianity); the Caliph gave St. John a free hand. One of the good father's books was a religious romance - the first Western one - called Barlaam and Joasaph.
The story of Barlaam and Joasaph is that of a young Indian prince, Josaphat (or Joasaph), being converted to Christianity by the arguments of Barlaam. Josaphat's story (before his conversion) is almost exactly the story of the Sakyamuni Buddha. Indeed, "Josaphat" is nothing but a Greek-formulation of "Bodhisat." This is fairly well established.
The online Catholic Encyclopedia says (about St. Josaphat):
The story is a Christianized version of one of the legends of Buddha, as even the name Josaphat would seem to show. This is said to be a corruption of the original Joasaph, which is again corrupted from the middle Persian Budasif (Budasif = Bodhisattva).
Barlaam and Joasaph was a huge hit. It was translated into all the European languages; there's even a version in the Spanish dialect used in the Philippines.
It used to be a practice in the Catholic Church to recite the names of saints and martyrs in the most sacred part of the service (so called Canon of the Mass, just before the Host is consecrated). That is why, of course, we speak of saints as being "canonized."
But who decided who was a saint and who wasn't? For a long time, the decision was left to local parishes. However, in 1170 A.D., Pope Alexander III decreed that the power to canonize saints rested exclusively with the Holy See. The names of the martyrs were no longer recited in the Canon but moved to a sub-service called the Prime. Over time, it became less and less permissible to include new names into the list of saints - the Martyrology - without getting explicit approval from the Pope. Trouble was, there were still several equally official Martyrologies floating aroud.
Pope Sixtus the Fifth (1585-1590) made
a move to eliminate these multiple versions by commissioning a single standard list of martyrs. Cardinal Cesare Baronius was assigned to draw up the Martryologium. It was decided to make the official Martyrologium as broad-minded as possible; the idea was to merge existing Martyrologies rather than pick a correct one (for obvious reasons). On November 27, 1610, Cardinal Baronius included:
The holy Saints Barlaam and Josaphat, of India, on the borders of Persia, whose wonderful acts St. John of Damascus has described.
Baronius seems to have included these names from the Catalogus Sanctorum, the fourteenth century Martyrology of Petrus de Natalibus, Bishop of Equilo (now Jesolo, Italy).
So there you have it. The Buddha is an official Catholic saint.
The Catholic Encyclopedia is resolutely unembarrassed about the whole incident. As I understand it, they take the position that sainthood is a human assignation, based on our understanding of what constitutes a miracle. The Vatican claims authority, not infallibility.
Isn't it strange how history works? A collection of stories, freed from their letter cages, moving across languages, belief systems and time. I'm reminded of the editor's advice in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: "When the legend become fact, print the legend."
There are also strange ironies. In the 19th century, Naryanan Balkrishnan Godbole, a Sanskrit pandit, translated the so-called Aesop's Fables of Planudes of Constantinople back into Sanskrit. The stories had returned home after almost 2000 years of wandering. I'm not sure if St. John's Barlaam and Joasaph exists in Pali; if it doesn't, it should.
St. Buddha would have agreed, I think.
How the Buddha became a Catholic Saint
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bevivek
URL
March 21, 2006
07:27 AM
Anil - Fascinating. I was particularly taken with the fact that the fables were translated back into Sanskrit.
Kathinka Froystad, who is a research fellow with the Univ of Oslo, has focussed on this phenomenon esp. relating to India. i.e originally Indian idea osmoses its way West, gets transformed into something else and comes back with the tide. However, this returning prodigal has streaked hair, wears bermudas, is rated A Kool by the next gen and becomes the rage. Art of Living, Osho, Hare Krsna cults and even Yoga have all returned with makeovers.
Now back to the original topic of Buddha being a catholic saint. My old prof, a gentle soul but a bit of a crank had the theses that Jesus was a wandering Hindu ascetic. He felt that the cross was nothing but a symbolic representation of the Hindu ascetic's staff with the one vestment change tied at the top thus forming the T (the curious may google for images of the Hindu reformer Sankara who's usually shown with such a staff). Jesus is therefore a Hindu saint. So there.
Anil Menon
URL
March 21, 2006
09:31 AM
Thanks for the pointer to Kathinka Froystad; her[?] work sounds intriguing. May be tied to our habit of not appreciating our own homegrown stuff till someone from the outside, preferably white, says wah, wah. Ramanujan, if you recall, had few native fans till Hardy said wah, wah. Ditto for C. V. Raman, Tagore, Desani and others too many to count. But I digress.
The Jesus bit made me laugh. A proof along the lines of Shakespeare is really Shekar Iyer and that Churchill come from churcha-karne-wallah. And the Mormons sent Jesus on a trip to the US where he met a different kind of Indian. Tales have long tails.
Nachiketa
URL
March 21, 2006
09:42 AM
Anil, a very enjoyable read. Thanks for the article.
temporal
URL
March 21, 2006
10:43 AM
informative!
st. anil?
;)
an so true about desani
Amrita
URL
March 21, 2006
11:08 AM
hey anil - this was fabulous. great job! the church is well known for adopting local heroes in order to advace its work - look at st.george for example, but i had no idea the buddha was one of them. but then the buddha is so adoption-worthy, isnt he?
to add to bevivek above on the question of jesus, one of my professors went walkabout in india for a time and he came across this story of a village that had been "converted" to christianity.
the missionary was on his way to the interior and just paused long enough to preach the gospel and give them a statue of christ on the cross. the villagers nodded their heads and embraced it heartily. a couple of years later the missionary came back and the proud villagers led him to the local temple. and there was jesus decked out in garlands and vermilion standing right next to vishnu. :)
that story might be apocryphal but it always made sense to me... if we can co-opt the buddha as an incarnation of vishnu on the sayso of the shankaracharya, then why not jesus? the best part about being a polytheist imo, is the level of inclusiveness that it allows you to embrace.
bevivek
URL
March 21, 2006
11:14 AM
Amrita - Mohammeda-avatar?
That should stump the Shiv Sena and Muslim League
Anil Menon
URL
March 21, 2006
11:30 AM
Thanks everybody. Rhys David, the Pali scholar, teased out the story in the 1930s.
@temporal: Nyet on the St. Like the Billy Joel song says: "I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints; the sinners are much more fun."
@Amrita: In the puja room of a Marathi schoolfriend of mine, they'd done exactly the sort of thing u described; vermillion, garland, the works. The photograph of the rather puzzled looking Jesus was tucked right next to Vishnu and Laxmi. My friend's mother referred to Jesus as 'Issu-bhagavan,' which seemed about right. Now, if only the moslems would fork over a photo of Allah or the Prophet-- a face, any face -- Hindus would rush to embrace Islam. It's tough to work with just a building (Kabba). Not that some Hindus don't try.
Phillip Winn
URL
March 21, 2006
12:09 PM
This is fantastic story -- I love it! Thanks.
temporal
URL
March 21, 2006
12:57 PM
anil:
...Now, if only the moslems would...
you will have to wait for a few years...but someday i will transcribe my taped interview with ismat chughtai ... who was one of the leading lady of urdu short stories
in her bedroom there was this puja corner... and she had garlands and flowers around hindu deities, sikh gurus, saibaba likes and jesus and qur'anic surahs...i must have smiled and she read my mind and commented on hedging her bets... what a wonderful person!
Amrita
URL
March 21, 2006
01:20 PM
@bevivek - lol. whats funny is that so many folks go to dargahs in bbay and delhi and ajmer and so on, and no one thinks twice about it. too bad the sufis are so marginalized, they had the right idea. and would prolly be heart attack in a beard to the fundos on both sides.
@anil - yeah, it's the visual thing. we need something to work on.
@temp - ah yes, your phantom tapes that never get transcribed. :P vaise, i've noticed that a lot of artists in india "hedge their bets" as you put it. I remember sarod player Amjad Ali Khan taking cameras around the area where he does riyaaz and there was Saraswati right next to surahs
Anil Menon
URL
March 21, 2006
01:49 PM
@temporal: Holy shit! U interviewed Chughtai! I just read a translation of her short stories a few weeks back. Reminded me of Manto, though I suppose she'd spit paan if she heard that. Transcribe the interview, temp. Just the sort of thing we need in Desicritics.
temporal
URL
March 21, 2006
02:06 PM
anil:
yes i did...
ismat was a nani like figure with smiling mischievous eyes...very soft spoken but had grit and iron...
just FYI: the transcripts will be done when amrita finishes her book and comes to TO to help me with the tapes as she promised...ismat is the not the only one...I have malik ram, ali sardar jafri, akhtar ul imaan, ahmed faraz, gopi chand narang, and tons more...some day perhaps...
...did i predict a few years?
temporal
URL
March 21, 2006
02:09 PM
oh and another digression anil:
early fifties was the period of the four musketeers in urdu lit... the four were krishn chander, ismat chughtai, saadat hasan manto and rajinder singh bedi...and what a period that was!
Amrita
URL
March 21, 2006
11:39 PM
temp - bahane banana koi aap se seekhe. why not do a piece on urdu lit. i remember a short riff that you did once that was quite interesting. i'd love to read it again. or maybe even an expanded version?
bevivek
URL
March 22, 2006
12:49 AM
Temporal - Wow !!!! Totally second Anil and Amrita. You *must* do a piece on this whether the interviews or on Urdu lit.
Amrita - You are right. Sufis are the crossovers. Fascinating when u come to think of it. And what is it about sufis? How have they managed this, be it Chishti or Mulla Nusruddin or Rumi? Is there anyone in the DC world who can write on sufis?
Sujatha
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March 22, 2006
01:12 AM
Anil, joining the party a bit late, but this was a fascinating essay, filled with nuggets of information.
Uttara
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March 22, 2006
06:21 AM
Hi Anil,
That was a really fascinating read. I remember reading Jacobs opinion when I was small and reading fairy tales. Thanks for this.
Anil Menon
URL
March 22, 2006
06:45 AM
@Uttara, Sujata: thanks.
(Uttara, your URL link isn't working at the moment).
Uttara
URL
March 22, 2006
08:08 AM
I have no idea why. It is www.mumbaigirl.blogspot.com
Anil Menon
URL
March 22, 2006
08:45 AM
@Uttara: The www.mumbaigirl.blogspot.com link works.
But the desicritics URL link, namely,
http://desicritics.org/mt/www.mumbaigirl.blogspot.com
gives a File not Found (for me anyway). Philip Winn may be able to shed some light.
Aaman
URL
March 22, 2006
09:03 AM
Whenever you use a URL in the URL field - make it an absolute URL - http://mumbaigirl.blogspot.com - mumbaigirl.blogspot.com is interpreted as a relative URL to the Desicritics server
davidrisrael
URL
March 22, 2006
11:01 AM
Lovely bit of scholarship-storytelling -- or maybe I should say storytelling-scholarship. Enjoyed.
cheers,
d.i.
sunil
URL
March 22, 2006
01:52 PM
fascinating. Thanks for this.
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