David B. Hart has a new essay at First Things about St. Josephat of India, revered in both Eastern and Western Christendom, whose legend has a surprising basis in fact:
There was, in fact, a real person—a very famous person, as it happens—behind the figure of the Christian saint; he simply was not a Christian. He was, rather, the man who in his own day came to be called Sakyamuni—“sage of the Sakya clan”—but whose given name tradition records as Prince Siddhartha of the house of Gautama: in short, the Buddha.
Bentley goes on to ask, “What then might we make of the delightful oddity that, in a sense, and admittedly under a foreign guise, the Buddha was for centuries venerated by Christians as one of their more beloved saints?”
There is, I suppose, no great moral to be extracted from the curious history of the legend of Barlaam and Josaphat, apart perhaps from the rather banal and ordinary observation that the partitions between religious cultures in the pre-modern world were far more porous than we typically tend to imagine, and the channels of literary and cultural influence far wider.
Read more at First Things.