Rejecting enlightenment? The medieval Christian transformation of the Buddha-legend in Jacobus de Voragine's Barlaam and josaphat
Bibliographic record
Abstract
By the time the story of the Buddha became popular in medieval Europe as the story of the Christian saints Barlaam and Josaphat it had been subjected to many significant changes, one of the most intriguing of which is the apparent removal of the protagonist's enlightenment. How does this removal relate to the re-crafting of the religious message of the text? Paying special attention to the most widely disseminated medieval version of the tale, that in the Golden Legend, I conclude that Barlaam and Josaphat is remarkable both for what it omits and what it retains. It certainly omits the formal attainment of Buddhahood, and in doing so it suggests that the answers to our questioning of the world cannot come through cognition alone. But it retains and even highlights the insight into the flawed nature of the world—an insight central to the Buddha—legend—and treats it as a prerequisite to spiritual fulfilment.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".