Biblical Buddhism: Tales and Sermons of Saint Iodasaph

Robert M. Price

Description

Medieval Churchmen heard the legend of Prince Siddhartha (the "Bodhisattva," or "Buddha-to-be") renouncing his wealth and seeking salvation as a monk, but they mistook it for the history of some Christian monk named "Iodasaph" (a corruption of "Bodhisattva"). Iodasaph was canonized as an official saint. The ironic result was that Gautama Buddha is a Roman Catholic saint!

What if such a remarkable religious hybrid actually lived? The brief pieces collected in this book depict what he might have taught, proclaiming Buddhism from the Bible! Amazingly, it turns out not to be much of a stretch! Saint Iodasaph will have you reading familiar texts with new (third?) eyes!

These vignettes originally appeared in The Christian*New Age Quarterly. One reader asked if they were genuine channeled revelations! That's high praise.

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie de la religion
• Philosophy
• Philosophie et théologie
• Buddhist

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 21 février 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781456604189
• Langue: English

Extrait

Biblical Buddhism
Tales and Talks of Saint Iodasaph
 
Robert M. Price
 


 
illustrated by
Lenny Blottin
 
Copyright 2011 Robert M. Price,
All rights reserved.
 
 
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
http://www.eBookIt.com
 
 
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-0418-9
 
 
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
 


 
Dedicated to Catherine Groves,
Beloved friend and longtime colleague through thick (me) and thin (her).
 


Acknowledgments
 
The contents of this book originally appeared in the pages of The Christian*New Age Quarterly . Many thanks for editor Catherine Groves’s permission to reprint them here. Contact the The Christian*New Age Quarterly at http://www.christiannewage.com /
 
“The Great Commandment” (Jan - Mar ’91)
“The Koan of the Sheep and the Goats” (Jul - Sep ’91)
“The Transformation Body” (Oct - Dec ’91)
“The Man Beset by Robbers” (Jan - Mar ’92)
“The Banquet Without Guests” (Apr - Jun ’92)
“The Scripture is Fulfilled” (Jul - Sep ’92)
“The Tree of Enlightenment” (Jan - Mar ’93)
“The Dancing Corpse” (Jan - Mar ’94)
“The Ferryman” (Oct - Dec ’94)
“Temptations Must Come” (Apr - Jun ’05)
“Gods in the Gutter” (Jul - Sep ’05)
“Seeking for Signs” (Oct ’05 - Jul ’06)
“Back in the Womb” (Aug ’06 - Apr ’07)
“The Cross and the Raft” (May - Oct ’07)
“Revelation of Nothing” (Nov ’07 - May ’08)
"Invisible Light" (June 2009-Feb. 2009 )
“The Serpent’s Wisdom” (Summer 2009)
“Blessed Are the Blind” (Winter 2009)
 
Christian*New Age Quarterly: A Bridge Supporting Dialog is proud to have been the original publisher of “The Tales of Saint Iodasaph” — the collection of which you now hold in your hands — as a column spanning nearly two decades. Conceived for and engaging C*NAQ readers, the venerable old Saint expressed a wisdom ideally befitting Christian*New Age Quarterly , which provides a bridge supporting dialog between the Christian tradition and alternative spiritualities. To discover more of the works of Robert M. Price published by Christian*New Age Quarterly — as well as to explore C*NAQ’s other delightful writers — visit www.christiannewage.com .
 
Introduction: Saint Iodasaph
 
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