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Hualin International Journal of Buddhist Studies 8.2 (2025): 190–224; https://dx.doi.org/10.15239/hijbs.08.02.08
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Buddhist Epigraphy and Women’s History)
The Buddha’s Journey to the West: The Textual Traditions of Barlaam and Josaphat from a Linguistic Perspective
Chia-Wei LIN
Université de Lausanne
chia-wei.lin@unil.ch
Abstract: This paper examines the textual tradition of Barlaam and Josaphat (B&J) from a philological and linguistic perspective. Originally a collection of jātaka stories framed by the biography of Śākyamuni Buddha, B&J was translated from an Indic source via Middle Persian into Arabic. From Arabic, B&J was rendered into Georgian, from Georgian into Greek, then from Greek into Latin. The Greek and Latin versions in turn gave rise to numerous translations into the medieval vernaculars of Europe—Germanic, Slavic, and Romance. The first part of the paper focuses on the frame story in Arabic, Georgian, and Greek, examining how the Buddhist narrative of the Buddha’s life was ‘Islamicized’ and ‘Christianized’ in the course of its translation and adaptation. The second part of the paper surveys the different versions of B&J along its transmission route from India through Central Asia to Europe. While previous research focuses on B&J within individual literary traditions, the present paper proposes to read B&J as a global phenomenon of language contact and intercultural exchange.
Keywords: translation studies, Buddha biography, intercultural contact, Buddhist–Christian exchange
About the Author: Lin, Chia-Wei is a graduate assistant (assistante diplômée) and Ph.D. student at the Section de langues et civilisations slaves et de l’Asie du Sud, Université de Lausanne. Her research interests include historical linguistics, language contact, indigenous grammatical traditions, Christian and Buddhist translations on the Silk Road. Her dissertation project examines the Arabic, Georgian, and Greek translations of Barlaam and Josaphat.
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
