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Art. II.–Book of the King's Son and the Ascetic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 March 2011

E. Rehatsek
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Extract

The striking fact that the Buddha has been officially enrolled in the list of the saints of the Christian Church has very naturally attracted much attention to the book to which this strange result is due. This book, a romance in Greek, founded on some unknown Buddhist life of the Buddha, was ascribed in some of the later MSS. to St. John of Damascus, and this was the view held by scholars until the publication in 1886 of the masterly monograph by M. H. Zotenberg (Notices sur la livre de Barlaam et Joasaph). He there shows conclusively that the John who was the author of the romance was not John of Damascus, but a monk of the convent of St. Saba near Jerusalem, who wrote it in the commencement of the seventh century A.D. This romance, whose hero, though really the Buddha, appealed so strongly to the sympathies of the Christians, that they raised him to the rank of a saint, contains, besides the description of the life and character of the hero, a number of fables, some of which have been traced back to the Buddhist Jataka book, while the source of others is still unknown. This being so, it becomes of great importance to ascertain the earliest form of the story. Now it is admitted that the numerous versions of it in various European languages (of which a list is given in my ‘ Buddhist Birth Stories,’ vol. i. pp. xcv and foll.)

Type
Original Communications
Information
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , January 1890 , pp. 119 - 155
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 1890

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References

page 131 note 1 Suvarna-dvipa, gold-island, in Sanskrit; considered to be Ceylon by Oriental, but Sumatra by Occidental, scholars.

page 134 note 1 Compare this with Matthew xiii. 3–23, and the identity will be found to be very striking.

page 136 note 1 This parable occurs also in Kalila va Dimnn, of which see zthe text of M. de Sacy, ed. 1816, ch. iv p. 75. I have also embodied it in my Indian Fables in Moslem Literature, which are however still in MS. only, and will probably remain so; my MS. contains nearly one hundred such fables.

page 137 note 1 Is this something like the evangelical advice to make friends with the mammon of unrighteousness?

page 138 note 1 It may be seen that this declaration is entirely in the Buddhist sense, who do not require Allah—and only long to attain the Nirâna which may perhaps he meant by the “kingdom of eternity” mentioned above—but He will also he alluded to afterwards; as also prophets, but none of them are specified by names or the religions they preached.

page 140 note 1 Could this be the “ supreme truth” of the Buddhists' Paramârtha-satya?

page 142 note 1 Buddhists often use the term internal law to designate Buddhist instruction, and external law for general instruction, which may perhaps bear some analogy to the two suns here described.

page 143 note 1 These words may perhaps be intended to mean the Moksha, and the last of them the Nirvâna.

page 145 note 1 The so-called dung-heap was a place of cremation, the prince and princess a Mehter and Mehtvani, as all who are acquainted with India will readily admit; but of course, under the British Government, even the places of cremation have fallen under sanitary regulations and police supervision, so that the above description is not quite so faithful in our days as it was in ancient times. The Buddhists called a place of cremation simply a heap, so it is perhaps not surprising that our Arabic text calls it a dung-heap.

page 148 note 1 This parable occurs also in the Persian work Shamsah va Quhquhah, but is undoubtedly of ancient Indian origin. A notice of this work occurs in Arbuthnot's, F. F.Persian Portraits; a Sketch of Persian History, Literature, and Politics, London, 1887, p. 119 seqGoogle Scholar.

page 149 note 1 If A'bdullah Ibn Muqaffa' was really the translator of the Pahlavi text into Arabic, it is no wonder that, although he occasionally mentions Allah, he abstains from alluding to the prophet Muhammad, to Islam, or to tenets peculiar to thatreligion, because his orthodoxy and sincerity therein were always suspected. He was slain in a very cruel manner some years before A.H. 142, i.e. A.D. 759.

page 150 note 1 These will easily be recognized as entirely evangelical sentiments, but also other ideas, formerly believed to be wholly and exclusively Christian, have been discovered in ancient Buddhist writings, e.g. the Pali Dhammapada.