Saturday Evening Re-post: Jumpin' Jehoshaphat!

NOTE: THIS POST BY RJ HUDDY ORIGINALLY APPEARED ON THE ORIGINAL BLOG FOR XPAT FICTION IN SEPTEMBER 2010.

We think of the archetypal narrative of an important individual as starting from some lowly or disadvantaged background, which the subject must then overcome in order to reach the ultimate level of greatness. The popularity of such stories in every culture and language would seem to indicate that at a basic level we all draw something from them. Maybe they inspire us--normal, average Joe's that we are--to punch above our weight. Or maybe we simply get a vicarious kick out of them.
But the opposing direction has its attraction too: a person born to great wealth and position gives it all up for some noble purpose.

(The Jesus narrative even manages it both ways, with one trajectory from birth in a stable to, thirty-three years later, ascension into heaven, and the opposite one, sacrificing his divine realm for earthly life as a flesh-and-blood human.)

The story of Siddhartha Gautama, the founder of Buddhism, is the riches-to-rags kind. Most people know the standard version. Astrologers warned King Suddhodana that his new son would be a soft-hearted sort, who, if he witnessed human suffering, would abdicate his princely status and become a holy man, so the king took every possible precaution to shield his son from knowledge of sickness, old age, and death. Young Gautama had everything he could desire, including, at age sixteen, a beautiful wife and, soon after that, a son. But eventually young Gautama ventured outside his father’s protective palaces and witnessed a sick person, an old man, and a corpse. He soon figured out that these were all part of the human condition, that he, and every single one of us, faced the same fate, so he set out on his quest to come to terms with this knowledge, and along the way founded Buddhism.

I didn’t know until recently that this legend had been so compelling during the middle ages that Christianity had absorbed it, in a baptized version, of course. It’s included in that wealth of saintly material so prized by medieval storytellers and Renaissance artists, The Golden Legend.

The king this time was called Avennir (or Abenner), a proud persecutor of Christians. Christianity has been a part of that vast palette of Indian religions since the earliest days. There are stories that the apostle Thomas ("Doubting Thomas") traveled to Kerala to preach to the Jewish communities there. Whether that's true or not, Christianity in India certainly goes way back, long before European empires took it to other colonial outposts, and King Avennir didn’t like it one bit. His astrologists warned him that his new son, Jehoshaphat, would grow up to be a Christian, so he ordered the son to be brought up in such a way that he never saw suffering people in need of Christ’s presence.

Of course once again the child slipped the leash, learned the truth, and became a Christian hermit. The day of commemoration in the Catholic Church was November 27, in the Eastern Orthodox, August 26. Thus did the title bodhisattva become transformed into Jehoshaphat, and the Buddha become a Christian saint.

 And why not? Jesus himself is considered a prophet in Islam, so fair’s fair.

—RJ Huddy