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Medieval Churchmen heard the legend of Prince Siddhartha (the "Bodhisattva," or "Buddha-to-be") renouncing his wealth and seeking salvation as a monk, but they mistook it for the history of some Christian monk named "Iodasaph" (a corruption of "Bodhisattva"). Iodasaph was canonized as an official saint. The ironic result was that Gautama Buddha is a Roman Catholic saint!
What if such a remarkable religious hybrid actually lived? The brief pieces collected in this book depict what he might have taught, proclaiming Buddhism from the Bible! Amazingly, it turns out not to be much of a stretch! Saint Iodasaph will have you reading familiar texts with new (third?) eyes!
These vignettes originally appeared in The Christian*New Age Quarterly. One reader asked if they were genuine channeled revelations! That's high praise.
- Sales Rank: #2030622 in eBooks
- Published on: 2011-07-21
- Released on: 2011-07-21
- Format: Kindle eBook
Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Review by the Reverend Daniel B. Hahn
By Christian*New Age Quarterly
My penchant began some twenty years ago: I'd receive my copy of Christian-New Age Quarterly in the mail and, if Robert Price had a new "Tale of Saint Iodasaph," that would be the first thing I'd read. They were so cool! Here were Christian-Buddhist dialogues in fanciful parables, guaranteed to shake those familiar Scripture stories free from their centuries-long sleepwalk of popular Biblical interpretation. They reminded me of some of the late Anthony de Mello's work, such as THE SONG OF THE BIRD or ONE MINUTE WISDOM, but more polished.
Some of the "Tales" astonished me with their clever, seamless meshing of Judeo-Christian Scripture and the Dharma, such as Price's take on Exodus 33 (and, yes, there is an excellent glossary at the end of this book, and it is well worth one's time to go back and forth):
"As one approached the heights of the Dharmakya, the Truth might be apprehended according to its Suchness, whence it is said that Moses, atop the summit, besought Isvara that he might see his face, and Isvara said to him, `You shall not see my face, for flesh shall not see me and live, but I will cause my back to be seen.' So Isvara said to Moses, for with the eye of flesh, only the back of the Truth may be seen. But with the third eye open one sees that there is no frontward visage of Truth to look upon, for it is without qualities; it is Void.
"If, then, one should thus view matters, with the eye of Dharma, how should Moses' commandment appear? One should then see, as the Lord Gautama saw, that heart, soul, and might alike vanish away as mist, even with Isvara himself. As one leaves behind the foothills of the Sambogkya and ascends to the crest of the Dharmakya, one sees plainly that all duality is overcome, that there is only the Truth-body, naught but the Buddha-nature." ("The Great Commandment," Kindle Location 176-178; see also Christian-New Age Quarterly, January-March 1991 and Spring 2012.)
Some of the "Tales," such as his retelling of the parable of the Good Samaritan ("The Man Beset by Robbers," Kindle Location 353-356; see also Christian-New Age Quarterly, January-March 1992), are downright disturbing, yet led me to contemplate the cost of material blessings and who pays. None left me cold. I would say to myself every time I finished a "Tale," when will that prolific Robert M. Price put these together in a book? He really should. The good news is he really did, sort of. BIBLICAL BUDDHISM: TALES AND SERMONS OF SAINT IODASAPH is now available as an e-book.
As Price explains in his fascinating Introduction, the actual Saint Iodasaph is one of the saints of the church whose identity is based in legend. He was:
"... the hero of a preachy novel of sorts that made the rounds of the ancient world in many languages including Greek, Latin (three different versions), Armenian, Arabic, Ghe'ez (pre-Coptic Ethiopian), Old Slavonic, Russian, Bielorussian, Serb, French, Occitan, Anglo-Norman, High German, and Norse. The oldest known fragments of any version of the tale are written in Turkomen. But the most famous version is the eleventh-century Greek Barlaam and Ioasaph credited to St. John of Damascus, though some now ascribe it to St. Euthymius the Georgian instead." (Kindle Location 67-71)
According to the legend, the remnant of Christians in India was undergoing persecution by a despot whose astrologer informed him that his son will either be a great king or a great convert to an outlawed sect, implying Christianity. The rest of the story also precisely parallels that of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha.
Nevertheless, Saint Iodasaph has a feast day, November 27, and the fact that the Buddha somehow slipped into Christian sainthood invites tantalizing possibilities that Price brilliantly and entertainingly exploits.
In Price's "Tales," Saint Iodasaph is the elderly leader of a Himalayan monastery, living when Buddhism had migrated as far as Tibet and divisions among the northern and southern schools of Buddhism had solidified. The historical Buddha lived some five hundred years before Jesus, and it is significant that simple linear time is inconsequential. Making too much of historical whens and wheres, it seems to me, would spoil the whole point. As Price indicates:
"What we have here is a serendipitous case of intertextual alchemy, a chance combination of chemicals to transmute the lead of religious intolerance and isolation into the gold of theological cross-fertilization and hybridization. The fact is, however it came to pass (in the mysterious providence of God?), the Buddha is a Christian saint!" (Kindle Location 100-103)
The fruit Price intends for his Saint Iodasaph project is a refreshed understanding of what Jesus was about.
"For myself, I can only say that for many years I have been pleasantly amazed time after time to see how familiar New Testament texts made new sense when placed in the doctrinal context of Buddhism, like holding up a multifaceted gem to the light from a new angle." (Kindle Location 138-140)
The cross itself is equated with the Tree under which Siddhartha Gautama sat until he was enlightened:
"`The son of man must be lifted up,' he thought as he saw the shadow of this throne against the horizon. `And I will not depart this tree until enlightenment is mine.'
"As the Bodhisattva remained upon the Bodhi Tree, Mara the Tempter appeared before him and danced for joy, thinking to be rid of this one who had pried so many from his grasp. But as noon drew near his glee vanished, for the sun grew dark and remained as an extinguished candle for the space of about three hours.
"Within the form that was fixed upon the tree, another sun, that of enlightenment, had risen, illuminating the way to the Pure Land. The light of the world had dawned." ("The Tree of Enlightenment," Kindle Location 535- 541; see also Christian-New Age Quarterly, January-March 1993.)
Throughout, Iodasaph uses Biblical narratives to shake his monks out of their complacent presuppositions; this may well befuddle readers who are not prepared to savor a Buddhist perspective. For example, Matthew 25:31-46, the parable of the judgment of all nations as sheep who have provided for the least -- and goats who have not -- becomes a koan Iodasaph leaves for three monks to contemplate. When he returns, he asks the monks what the koan means.
The youngest offers the standard Christian interpretation, that "we, too, ought to provide for those poor within the brotherhood, since in that manner we serve the unknown Maitreya. Only so may we expect salvation." To this Iodasaph replies: "Are you so sure you have found the way of salvation, my son? I think instead it is the road to Hell you have marked out in these few words." ("The Koan of the Sheep and the Goats," Kindle Location 224-231; see also Christian-New Age Quarterly, July-September 1991.)
Iodasaph commends the second monk's Mahayana Buddhist interpretation:
"`One must renounce the goal of salvation for once and all, pressing on instead to become a bodhisattva. Then one's good deeds and alms for the poor may contribute to the salvation of all beings, so that there is no difference between sheep and goats. For truly as long as only some reach Nirvana, others must be damned. There can be no true Nirvana till all attain it, and the cleft between Nirvana and Samsara itself be overcome.'" (Ibid., Kindle Location 247-250)
The kicker is the response of the third monk:
"The third monk spoke not, but began to bleat like a goat, or perhaps it was a sheep, for I know not the difference. At this, the Saint sat back in his seat and smiled a great smile." (Ibid., Kindle Location 257-261)
Discursive reasoning has its place, but in matters of spirit such reasoning can be a sizeable impediment to understanding. How can anyone appreciate nonduality when one is either correct or incorrect? Yet discursive reasoning has pervaded Western religion for most of its history. The hallmark of dualistic thinking is control: good must conquer evil, truth must prevail over error, and the unclean must be kept from the clean. The upshot has been a church that quickly devolved into a risk-averse, shallow, antiscience, repressive, exclusive, and conformity-enforcing enterprise, as David Kinnaman pointed out in YOU LOST ME: WHY YOUNG CHRISTIANS ARE LEAVING CHURCH...AND RETHINKING FAITH (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2011). The only glue that could hold any such arrangement together is terror. For Christianity, that would be the terror of a damned afterlife. Once that terror abates, as it has in the past fifty years for Euro-American Christianity, people abandon the enterprise.
The quest of the past fifty years, for those who have physically or emotionally left the dualistic church, has been for spiritually authentic experience. Thus the third monk bleats his own actual, authentic experience.
I believe that a primary medicine for an ailing church involves befuddling it out of its dualistic certitudes. "The Tales of Saint Iodasaph" strongly suggest this, without the irony of a long, discursive argument. What is particularly valuable about BIBLICAL BUDDHISM too is its recovery of Jesus from centuries of mischaracterization.
Jesus was not primarily a moral teacher backing his message with images of God's wrath by threatening people with "wailing and gnashing of teeth." That image was common in parables, yet to Jesus' audiences, none of the authority figures in the parables evoked God. They were tyrants, fools, or both. Nor do I think Jesus was primarily an eschatological prophet -- as much of twentieth-century scholarship maintains -- who thus would have been misguided about the kingdom being at hand. No, like Iodasaph, Jesus was a befuddler.
In Mark 4:11-12 Jesus tells his disciples: "To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything comes in parables; in order that `they may indeed look, but not perceive, and may indeed listen, but not understand; so that they may not turn again and be forgiven.'" Both Matthew and Luke repeat Jesus' affirmation of his mission of befuddlement.
And Jesus did, after all, spend his career confronting a religion that had devolved into an enterprise of separating the clean from the unclean. Isaiah 55:8 reminds us: "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord." Indeed, how are we to grasp the Lord's thoughts if we frame them in terms of our own? In my opinion, that's the core epistemological problem Jesus challenges. BIBLICAL BUDDHISM suggests that we should confront the selfsame problem ourselves.
In one of the later "Tales," a visiting monk is aghast at how monks in Iodasaph's monastery "treat the holiest of objects in such a careless, nay, blasphemous, manner." The Saint responds with a parable told by Jesus:
"`A man found himself beset by enemies who pursued him as far as a river bank, where he saw no means of crossing, and the rushing river was too deep for him to swim in safety. He still had a good lead, so he looked about him and began to construct a raft as quickly as he could, using such logs, branches, and vines as lay to hand. He pushed off shore just as the bushes shook with the approach of his foemen. As they stood cursing and vainly shaking their fists, he poled across the river. His enemies gave up and returned home. When he reached the far shore, what do you think he did with the raft that had borne him there? Do you think perhaps that he was so grateful to the raft, which after all had saved him, that forever afterward he walked about with the raft strapped to his back like a great turtle shell? No, but he abandoned it upon the shore in case anyone else might have similar need for it, and he went his way. So, too, when you have gained the benefit of the cross and of the scripture and of my doctrine, you must cast them away lest they burden your souls. For it is the dead weight of such shells that causes religious wars and persecutions.'" ("The Cross and the Raft," Kindle Location 1036-1044, see also Christian-New Age Quarterly, May-October 2007)
What an elegant way to exhort us all to get our spiritual noses out of books and into life!
The Reverend Daniel B. Hahn is Pastor of Grace Lutheran Church in Niskayuna, New York. He has also served as Christian-New Age Quarterly's Christian Focus Book Reviewer for over 15 years.
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