Event Information:

• Wed

  21

  Jun

  2023

  What if Christian saints turn out to be Buddhists? The Barlaam and Josaphat legend in Japan and its afterlives

  FU Berlin & online

  As part of the lecture series “The Invention of the Modern Religious Bookshelf: Canons, Concepts and Communities“ at the Cluster of Excellence 2020 "Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective" Katja Triplett (Leipzig / Marburg) gives a lecture:
  While its narrative plot of the Barlaam and Josaphat legend remained relatively stable throughout centuries of linguistic translation outside of Buddhist India, knowledge of its Buddhist origin became lost in Christian Europe. Early modern missionaries reintroduced it to Buddhist Japan as a Christian legend, arguably being ignorant of its origin. By reference to the Barlaam and Josaphat legend, the will offer some thoughts on how to analyze the global flows of narrative plots that were felt to be particularly attractive, from a study-of-religions perspective.