Let me tell you the story of saints Barlaam and Josaphat of India. A king named Abenner, who persecutes Christians, hears from his court astrologers that his son will attain great power and rule over India. But one astrologer predicts that the prince will instead become a great holy man – a Christian. Alarmed, Abenner has the young prince Josaphat isolated from external contact and sees that Josaphat is pampered, with servants attending to his every need.

But Josaphat becomes curious about the outside world, and eventually is allowed to leave the palace. On these trips, he encounters men ravaged by illness, old age, and death. He is in the middle of a crisis of faith when he meets a Christian hermit named Barlaam, converts, and continues to profess the Christian faith despite his father’s best efforts.

Eventually, Abenner chooses to share the throne with Josaphat. Later Abenner himself converts, and after many years as a wise ruler, Josaphat retreats to the desert to meet his old teacher and live out his days as a monk.¹

This might sound familiar to students of world religions: it’s a close parallel of the story of the Gautama Buddha, the founder of the Buddhist tradition. This is no coincidence.

The story of Barlaam and Josaphat first shows up in the Christian tradition in the 10^th century, in Georgia as the Balavariani. It seems to have been derived from an Arabic version, the Book of Bilawhar and Budhasaf. The name “Budhasaf” in turn comes from the Persian version “Bodisav”, and thence from the Sanskrit “Bodhisattva”. Somewhere over the successive retellings, the Buddha’s story morphed into a Christian one.

And the story was fully embraced by Christian churches. The Roman Catholic Church included the two saints in older versions of its martyrology, and various Orthodox churches still mention them today.² Translations of their story reached as far as Iceland, and were even brought by Christian missionaries back to Asia, as seen in a 1591 Japanese translation by Jesuit missionaries.³

Individual Western historians have noted the similarities between the story of Barlaam and Josaphat and the story of the Buddha for centuries – for example, it’s mentioned in an early printed edition of Marco Polo’s travels from 1446.⁴ But it was only in the mid-19^th century that the saints’ tale was generally acknowledged as being derived from the Buddha’s.

World religions have influenced each other for as long as they’ve been in contact. Many of the world’s religious monuments have remained holy sites to their local people even as specific religions came and went – the Hagia Sophia, the Parthenon, the Mosque–Cathedral of Córdoba, and Angkor Wat, just to name a few. Christianity in particular has a history of absorbing other religions’ traditions: see for example the Day of the Dead, which combined Indigenous and Spanish festivals into a national symbol of Mexico.⁵ But concepts from Christianity have also been borrowed by other faiths, as with the so-called “Jesus Sutras” from the 7^th century which restate Christian teachings from a Taoist and Buddhist perspective.⁶

All this tells me that there’s something about our relationship with the divine and the sacred that transcends individual eras and places. A place or a festival or a story that appeals to our common senses of awe or morality or wisdom can reach people of any faith tradition. Perhaps they’ll interpret it through their own lens, of course. But in the end, isn’t that all we have?