No. 0070
Saint Buddha
How Gautama became a Catholic, Thursday, February 10, 2005 at 0000 hours IST














The Christian world is crowded. Effectively, a New Testament text (Hebrews 12:1) says that we are in a huge and cosmic stadium, “surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, the saints, all of them alive to God and our companions, seeing how we ‘run the race’”.
A curious fact in the official list of saints of the Catholic Church is the cryptic presence of one who is perhaps the greatest Indian saintly figure of all time: Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, the ‘Awakened One’.
His presence in the Catholic book of saints is hidden under the name of Saint Josaphat.
Surely, he is not in the Christian calendar because the Church explicitly acknowledges the saintliness of the founder of Buddhism; only Christians are included in the liturgical list of saints.
The Buddha is there because of the story of ‘Barlaam and Josaphat’, an ancient version, probably originating in Tamil Nadu, of the renunciation of the Bodhisattva or Bodhisat. The story, incorporated in the Lalitavistara, travelled from India to Central Asia and hence into Arabic literature where the Manichaean Bodisaf became Yudasaf (perhaps because of a confusion in the written vernacular initial), and hence into Georgian literature and to Greek and Latin writings where the name took the form of Josaphat, and hence to the vernaculars of all Europe.
In the late sixteenth century the popes had the ancient official book of saints or martyrology revised. It was published by Pope Gregory XIII in 1584. Cardinal Baronius, who had a leading part in the revision, incorporated in the book the legend of the Indian prince converted by the monk Barlaam and turned into a Christian!
The monk Barlaam was an addition to the original story introduced somewhere during its long journey to the West. Baronius was keen on purifying the martyrology of apocryphal legends but accepted this story on the authority of the writings of St John Damascene (c. 657-749 CE) who often mentioned the two ascetics.
The entry in the martyrology, 27 November, reads, ‘In the Indies, bordering upon Persia, Saints Barlaam and Josaphat, of whose wondrous deeds St John Damascene has written’. After the enormous modern research on this story, St Josaphat is likely to be dropped from the martyrology in the next revision — a pity!
At the moment the Buddha is still officially, even if cryptonoymously, celebrated in the Catholic Church.
Extracted from ‘Christianity in India: Two Thousand Years of Faith’, by Leonard Fernando and G. Gispert-Sauch, Viking 2004