The Migration of Myths And The Cross-Cultural Participation In Shared Divine Truths

My task in this introductory chapter is to help us become more aware of this truth; or simply to remind us of it. The unity of humankind’s religious history is obvious, once one sees it. We have, however, been assiduously trained not to see it. Even more strongly, we have been pressured not to think it; and not to feel it. Yet today it beckons our minds. I cannot, of course, at best do more than hurriedly suggest it and partially illustrate it, in one brief presentation here. An ambition of mine has for some time been to try my hand, before I die, at writing a world history of religion in the singular: century by century, rather than in the more customary fashion of system by system. For the moment, we must content ourselves rather with a perspective opened up by two or three, I hope illuminating, examples.

First we turn to Russia in the nineteenth century, to the figure of Leo Tolstoi. As is well known, this intense and brilliant aristocrat underwent in mid-life a drastic spiritual conversion. After a somewhat dissipated youth, and then for a time the career of an army officer, he had become a relatively well-to-do landlord and illustrious writer; then, in what seemed a sudden right-about-face, he turned, in a dramatic renunciation, from worldly success to an ascetic life of non-violence, poverty and social service. It was a religious conversion of a fairly classic pattern. Behind him lay sufficient fame, and within him sufficient power, that the move had considerable repercussion.

This shift by Tolstoi from the worldly life to the spiritual, by which his personal religious crisis was resolved, appeared sudden. Yet it may be recognised as the product of profound forces that had for long been operating in his mind and personality. In his subsequent Confessions, widely circulated, he indicates that the conversion was crystallised rather suddenly by his reaction to a transparent fable from the Lives of the Saints. Clearly the entire process was enmeshed in the large context of his ambivalent but deep relations to the Church and to the whole Christian complex, most conspicuously his study of the Gospels, as he makes clear in his powerful writings produced at about this time: his attacks upon institutionalised Church and State and his exalting of the humble and meek. This one particular fable, however, seems to have served as a catalyst. In this tale, the human condition is portrayed as like that of a man who, fleeing from a furious beast, falls into a well and is held from dropping into the jaws of a devouring dragon below only by clinging to a bush that will, he sees, presently inevitably give way, since it is being nibbled at by two mice, one white and one black, that go round and round and slowly but relentlessly gnaw at its roots. The two mice are day and night; the bush, which tastes sweet at first but soon loses its savour, is one’s worldly position; man knows that he or she must in due course die.

This myth, or parable, evidently made a profound impression on Tolstoi, quite changing the course of his existence. He had come to find his life hauntingly vacuous: meaningless despite his position, wealth and fame. His readiness to turn his back on his worldly goods, and to start afresh by going forth into the world in ascetic piety, was given form by this particular fable and triggered as he accepted it for himself. Of it he writes in his Confession, ‘This is no fable. It is a real unanswerable truth.’

Our reason for noting this tale is that it formed part of a complex that had indeed had an altogether remarkable power; not only in Tolstoi’s life, but in that of many thousands, if not millions, of others. It came to him from Christian hagiography, in an account of the lives of Saints Barlaam and Josaphat, to use their Latin names. This story, still alive and effective in nineteenth-century Russia, had there and elsewhere a striking—one could almost say, stunning—history.

Throughout mediaeval Christendom it had been extremely popular: more influential than nowadays we can readily conceive. Indeed, it is hard for our non-ascetic and literarily cluttered minds to credit the onetime widespread prevalence of such a legend. The Russian tale was taken from an early Greek version, from which had come also a Latin, which in turn spread of course in Western Europe. Among other Slavonic languages into which the tale was rendered, and in which it became popular, were Czech and Polish. The West had vernacular versions not only in Italian, Spanish, French, German, and the like, as well as Swedish and Norwegian, but also in, for instance, Icelandic, in which there was a translation as early as about 1204. The mediaeval Christian consciousness was in no negligible part formed by this story. Its central theme is the renunciation of worldly power and wealth by a young prince, Josaphat, who, under the influence of the preaching of an otherworldly hermit, Barlaam, is baptised a Christian, abdicates his throne, and goes off into the wilderness in ascetic piety. He has left the world of pomp and pelf and worldly power to seek instead moral and spiritual truth.

Although the story as presented is explicitly Christian, the scene is set in India. Josaphat is portrayed as an Indian prince, converted by Barlaam, a Sinai desert monk.

The Greek version, underlying, as we have said, virtually all the Christian mediaeval ones, east and west, was for long attributed to John of Damascus. It is now known, however, to have been produced rather in the eleventh century on Mt Athos by a Georgian monk; and to have been taken by him from a simpler Georgian rendering, of the tenth or more probably the ninth century.

It was the Georgians – that ‘Christian nation of the East’ – who had turned the story into a Christian tale.

Their original, however, was Islamic. They had taken the story from a Muslim source, circulating in Arabic. The motif was the same: Muslim piety also at that time was receptive to an otherworldly spirituality articulated in a tale of a wealthy prince who turns his back on the material world to go out in search of salvation in devout asceticism. The Arabic version itself maintained a long and widespread popularity in the Muslim community. For example, in the nineteenth century an edition was lithographed in Bombay, and the new Ahmadiyyah movement in Islam took it up and adapted it for its own purposes. One may note in passing also that, alongside the continuingly prevalent popularity of the Muslim Arabic version, from the Greek rendering of the Georgian Christian modification of this tale there came also later a Christian Arabic version, which circulated among Christians in the Near East.

The story was not, however, original with the Muslims. Rather, they gave it an Islamic form; but they had got it in Central Asia from the Manichees – that fascinating community which for some centuries in Western Asia established itself, grew and flourished, and looked for a time as if it might prove to be one of the most expansively successful of the world’s religious movements. Theirs was a syncretising movement; and it is not surprising to discover that they in turn had incorporated into their spiritual lore from Sogdian, Middle Persian and old Turkish sources this particular story, along with others, from the Buddhist movement, which in the first half of the first millennium A.D. had in missionary zeal firmly penetrated Central Asia.

For the legend is indeed a Buddhist one. It was fundamentally the story of Siddhartha Gautama and his setting forth from his palace home, having turned his back on family, wealth and worldly power to go off in search of enlightenment. He became ‘the Buddha’ on gaining that enlightenment under the Bo tree; at the time of his Great Renunciation he was, not yet a Buddha, but a future Buddha, or ‘Bodhisattva’. This word appears then in the Manichee versions as Bodisaf, in the Arabic version as Yudasaf, in the Georgian as lodasaph, in the Greek as loasaph, and in the Latin as Josaphat. 

The particular form of this Buddhist story that gave rise to the wide-spreading tale is itself an amalgam, partly found in a text known as the Lalitavistara, composed in Sanskrit in the fourth or perhaps the second century A.D. The Mahayana movement had picked up the motif, and presently carried it also to China and Japan.

The story of origins does not stop here, however. The particular fable with which we began, that of the man in the well with the circulating black and white mice nibbling away at his precarious hold on life, a tale that had become incorporated into the Barlaam and Josaphat legend, and which struck Tolstoi with symbolic force, the Buddhists had added to the story of their own saviour. They picked it up for incoporation from either a Hindu or a Jain source. For both these communities are known to have made use of the fable, in their own spiritual teachings.

There is some suggestion that it may ultimately have had a pre- Aryan origin.

Let us, next, supplement our following back of the complex and rather astonishing career of this story by retracing our steps, forwards. From its prevalence in the Muslim world it spread then also to Jewish circles. Abraham ben Hasdai in Barcelona in the early thirteenth century produced from the Arabic, with appropriate adaptations, a Hebrew version, and this became widespread in the Jewish world. Of the Jewish tale, the sixteenth century saw a Constantinople edition, and an Italian; the eighteenth, German and Polish. Also in the eighteenth century a German translation appeared, followed by another German paraphrase; and as recently as the nineteenth century it re-emerged in a Yiddish version.

We may, however, push the matter still further. Although it is entrancing to discover that Tolstoi, in nineteenth-century Russia, had his spiritual life given shape by a story that we can trace from the Jains, and perhaps from pre-Sanskritic India, and although it is also significant that his writings about his conversion, although suppressed for a time within Russia, were published in Geneva and translated into most Western languages and circulated far and wide, none the less the story does not end there. It is not merely a question of the West’s being influenced from the Orient, a situation that has marked its religious history for long. Also striking is that at the turn of this century, in London, a young and brilliant Westernising intellectual from India, who had come there to study British law, met such works of Tolstoi’s and was in his turn profoundly stirred by them. His name was M. K. Gandhi.

The impact made on the young Gandhi by reading Tolstoi was great; not only in the sense that it hit him hard at the time, but also in that it changed the course of his life also, with consequences ramifying throughout his career and ultimately throughout the world. He did not immediately abandon ‘the world.’ He did turn to a concern for service to others; for spiritual inwardness; and for moral purity and ascetic discipline. He read the Bhagavad Gita first in London, in English. In South Africa, somewhat later, when the welfare of his fellow Indians took precedence for him over his own career and other concerns, he established near Johannesburg as the embodiment of his then vision what he chose to call Tolstoy Farm. For a time, Tolstoi’s influence was perhaps as decisive in Gandhi’s thinking and feeling as that of any one thinker. No doubt over the years, not least after he left England and later South Africa and settled once more in India, he turned more and more back to his own Indian tradition, in a complex way both Jain and ‘Hindu’: and there (and in the influence that of course he had consciously and unconsciously absorbed from it as a child) he rediscovered nurture for, deepening of, and elaborations from, his in one sense new spiritual and humane orientation. Yet, as with Tolstoi, and with others, a particular matter had served as a catalyst for spiritual capacity deep within him, long tacitly developing, and for spiritual response to an ancient tradition round about him. One might almost say that he spent the rest of his life as it were repatriating to India and exploring the Indian basis of and articulations for the impetus and aspiration of a style of moral living that India as a whole had never lost but for which Europe had at a given moment supplied him with the activating symbol — a figuration that Europe itself a millennium or so earlier had borrowed for its own spiritual life, and whose dynamic he was now, as it were, taking back home. 

We should seem, then, to have come full circle: from India to India via Sogdiana, Baghdad, Georgia, Mt Athos, Kiev, Geneva, London and Durban.

The circle does not stop spinning, however. Gandhi’s most important twenticth-century disciple, it has been suggested, is perhaps Martin Luther King, whose non-violence both as a formulated ideal and as a deep character orientation he learned in substantial part from Gandhi.