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Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

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326    MARCO POLO   BOOK III.

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unul Ezi;lische Literatur, II. p. 314 serf j., comparing the Book of Barlaem and Joasaph with the work of Barthélemy St. Hilaire on Buddha, arrived at the same conclusion.

In i88o, Professor T. W. Rhys Davids has devoted some pages (xxxvi.-xli.) in his Buddhist Birth Stories ; or, Jataka Tales, to The Bar-lawn 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 Desolo, near Venice, from 1370 to 1400, wrote a Martyrology called Catalog; its Sarctorunz ; 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 Abenēr, 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 Muller, 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 (Barlaanz andJoasaph. Eine Bibliographisch—literar;eschichtliche 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 soine.Buddhist wrote in Pehlevi a Book of Yzîddsaf (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 Vûdâsaf, 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

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