How the Buddha Became Two Christian Saints

The Catholic and Orthodox churches once venerated saints Barlaam and Josaphat, whose legend follows an Indian prince, Josaphat, kept in luxurious isolation by a father determined to prevent a prophecy. Confronted on rare outings by sickness, aging, and death, the prince has a spiritual crisis, is converted by a hermit named Barlaam, and eventually renounces the throne for a life of ascetic devotion. The plot is the life of Gautama Buddha with a Christian veneer, and the resemblance is not accidental.

The tale can be traced backward through a chain of translations: a 10th-century Georgian text drawn from an Arabic version, whose ‘Budhasaf’ descends from Persian ‘Bodisav’ and ultimately the Sanskrit ‘Bodhisattva.’ Across successive retellings the Buddha’s biography was absorbed into Christian hagiography, spreading as far as Iceland and even carried back to Asia by Jesuits in a 1591 Japanese translation. Western readers noticed the parallel for centuries — it appears in a 1446 printed edition of Marco Polo — but scholars only formally acknowledged the Buddhist origin in the mid-19th century.

The author frames this as one example of how religions borrow from one another as they come into contact — shared holy sites like the Hagia Sophia and Angkor Wat, Christianity’s absorption of local festivals such as Día de los Muertos, and the 7th-century ‘Jesus Sutras’ that recast Christian teaching in Taoist and Buddhist terms. The takeaway is that stories tapping into common human instincts for awe and wisdom travel across faith traditions, reinterpreted through each culture’s own lens.