The story begins as hagiography: Abenner, a Christian-persecuting king of India, hears his astrologers predict that his newborn son Josaphat will either rule the world or become a great holy man. Alarmed, he seals the prince inside a pampered palace, cut off from the outside. On his first escorted trips beyond it, Josaphat encounters a man ravaged by illness, one by old age, and a corpse — and lands in a crisis of faith. A Christian hermit named Barlaam converts him, Josaphat holds to his faith through his father’s schemes, and after Abenner himself converts and shares the throne, the prince finally retreats to the desert to live out his days as a monk.
Students of world religions will recognize the shape: it is the biography of the Gautama Buddha, and the resemblance is no coincidence. The story enters the Christian tradition in the tenth century as the Georgian Balavariani, apparently derived from an Arabic Book of Bilawhar and Budhasaf — “Budhasaf” from the Persian “Bodisav,” and ultimately from the Sanskrit bodhisattva. Somewhere along the chain of retellings, the founder of Buddhism became two canonized Christian saints, kept in older Roman Catholic martyrologies and still commemorated by Orthodox churches today.
The legend traveled far: translations reached Iceland, and Christian missionaries carried the story back to Asia in a 1591 Japanese edition produced by Jesuits. Western historians had noticed the parallel for centuries — an early printed Marco Polo from 1446 already flags it — but only in the mid-nineteenth century was the saints’ tale generally acknowledged to descend from the Buddha’s.
Signore Galilei’s point is the porosity of the sacred. Religions have been absorbing one another for as long as they’ve been in contact, and holy places outlast their founders — the Hagia Sophia, the Parthenon, the Mosque–Cathedral of Córdoba, Angkor Wat. Christianity absorbed the Day of the Dead, and it also gave its own teachings away: the seventh-century Jesus Sutras restate Christian doctrine in Taoist and Buddhist idiom. Stories that appeal to common awe, morality, or wisdom reach people of any tradition, read through each tradition’s own lens. “In the end, isn’t that all we have?”