The Buddha legend, recorded in two Sanskrit texts, the Lalitavistara in the first century BC and the Buddhacarita in the first century AD, was spread to both the Eastern Asia and the Western Asia. These texts served as the starting point for our resea ...
The Buddha legend, recorded in two Sanskrit texts, the Lalitavistara in the first century BC and the Buddhacarita in the first century AD, was spread to both the Eastern Asia and the Western Asia. These texts served as the starting point for our research of the transmission of the Buddha legend and we examined both of these texts. Among the various routes by which the Buddha legend was transmitted, we followed the one into the Western world, of which the first region of contact was Persia. There, Manichean elements were added to the legend and it resulted in the Manichean version of the Buddha legend, written in the Old Persian. Despite the importance of the Old Persian text, we had to examine the text in the translations by Von Lecoq and by Walter Henning, an expert in Old Persian being unavailable. The Buddha legend with Manichean elements then travels into the Islamic world in the ninth century and there it was transformed into the Arabic version, Kitab Bilauhar wa Budhasaf, with new cultural and religious elements added, and this text was examined in its original. From there, this somewhat transformed Buddha legend was spread further to the West, and in the tenth century it appeared in the Old Georgian version, where the Buddha legend was first transformed into a Christian hagiography. The Old Georgian text is transmitted to us in two versions which were translated into English by D.M. Lang and we based our research about the Old Georgian text on these translations, again an expert in Old Georgian not being available. The transformation of the Buddha legend into a Christian hagiography is consolidated and completed in the Greek version in the eleventh century. The Greek version is handed down to us in more than one hundred manuscripts and it was published by J. F. Boissonade in 1832, which was used for the analysis of the text. The Latin version of the text, now the hagiography of the Saints Barlaam and Josaphat, was the translation of the Greek text, with a few additions. Its oldest manuscript is dated 1048 and about sixty manuscripts of the vulgata version of the Latin texts copied between the twelfth and the sixteenth centuries are handed down to us. Both the Napoli version and vulgata version was examined. The vulgata Latin version serves as the original or the basis of the same story which appeared in abundance in various European languages, including French and Spanish, since the central Middle Ages. We examined the Spanish version of Barlaam and Josaphat in the original.
The first year of our research was focused on the detailed examination of each version itself based on the manuscript evidence and secondary literature on the texts collected during the research trips abroad of each member of our team. On regular basis we held seminars where we discussed the similarities and dissimilarities of the texts in different languages regarding the main plot, structure, style, etc. In the second year of our research, more in-depth comparison of the Sanskrit, Manichean, Georgian, Arabic, Greek, Latin and Spanish version of the story was made in every respect of the text, in particular in its religious, ethic and social aspects. On the basis of our discussion, we attempted to draw a broad outline of the cultural exchange and influence between the Eastern and the Western world which was realized over centuries.