and gains access to Prince Josaphat, to whom he
imparts the Christian doctrine and commends the monastic life. Suspicion
arises and Barlaam departs. But all attempts to shake the prince's
convictions fail. As a last resource the king sends for Theudas, a
magician, who removes the prince's attendants and substitutes seductive
girls; but all their blandishments are resisted through prayer. The king
abandons these efforts and associates his son in the government. The prince
uses his power to promote religion, and everything prospers in his hands.
At last Abenner himself yields to the faith, and after some years of
penitence dies. Josaphat surrenders the kingdom to a friend called
Barachias and departs for the wilderness. After two years of painful search
and much buffeting by demons he finds Barlaam. The latter dies, and
Josaphat survives as a hermit many years. King Barachias afterwards
arrives, and transfers the bodies of the two saints to India, where they
are the source of many miracles.

Now this story is, _mutatis mutandis_, the story of Buddha. It will suffice
to recall the Buddha's education in a secluded palace, his encounter
successively with a decrepit old man, with a man in mortal disease and
poverty, with a dead body, and, lastly, with a religious recluse radiant
with peace and dignity, and his consequent abandonment of his princely
state for the ascetic life in the jungle. Some of the correspondences in
the two stories are most minute, and even the phraseology, in which some of
the details of Josaphat's history are described, almost literally renders
the Sanskrit of the _Lalita Vistara_. More than that, the very word Joasaph
or Josaphat (Arabic, _Y[=u]dasatf_) is a corruption of Bodisat due to a
confusion between the Arabic letters for Y and B, and Bodisatva is a common
title for the Buddha in the many birth-stories that clustered round the
life of the sage. There are good reasons for thinking that the Christian
story did not originate with John of Damascus, and a strong case has been
made out by Zotenberg that it reflects the religious struggles and disputes
of the early 7th century in Syria, and that the Greek text was edited by a
monk of Saint Saba named John, his version being the source of all later
texts and translations. How much older than this the Christian story is, we
cannot tell, but it is interesting to remember that it embodies in the form
of a speech the "Apology" of the 2nd-century philosopher A