Josaphat the Bodhisattva

 

Today was a quiet day of working from home, but a funny thing happened on my way back from adoration: I was stopped by a train on Sherman Avenue, and it was very long and slow. Finally it passed, and I headed toward home. On Troy Avenue the road goes under a railroad bridge, and the train was passing overhead as I drove beneath it. Then when I got to Westport Road, the train was going alongside me. I pulled into the Nau-Ti-Gal parking lot to watch it go by, then I crossed the road to go home... and I saw my neighbor making a video. She began to laugh, and she showed me the video, so then I laughed too. In the video she made of the train, she was saying, "See, Famous? I finally saw a train! The first one this whole summer! That car pulled over to watch the train too - must be another train fan. Wait, is that you, Famous?? Too funny!!" And you see me driving towards her... and then the video ends.

I was today years old when I learned that Catholics have venerated the Buddha as a saint for centuries. There was an article about an exhibit of Buddhist art at a museum in New York City, and someone had written a comment that Christians venerate the Buddha as Saint Josaphat. I thought, "What???" and looked it up, and darned if that person wasn't right. There was a pious legend about a prince in India who, upon meeting a Christian hermit, renounced his title to become a Christian. Some scholar in the nineteenth century thought that sounded an awful lot like the story of Siddhartha Gautama, and then he realized that "Josaphat" is a corruption of Bodhisattva, a title for the Buddha. Now of course the Buddha lived many centuries before Jesus, so I can promise you that he was not a Christian, but Christians arriving in India might have found the Buddha's teachings somewhat compatible with Christ's, so they just made him an honorary Christian. Since this is a pious legend, that Josaphat was never formally canonized, but he was recognized as a saint for many centuries. There is a canonized St. Josaphat, the Polish martyr, and the gorgeous basilica in Milwaukee is named after him. Too bad - what a hoot if such a beautiful church were named after the Buddha! So now I can wear my Buddhist prayer beads to church, and if people say, "What's that?" I can just say, "I'm venerating St. Josaphat." This is not really surprising to me, since "Catholic" means "universal," so we can claim anyone as a saint. Some people say Boethius (not my computer) was more of a pagan philosopher than a theologian, but he is known as St. Severinus. And there has been some talk of canonizing Dietrich Bonhoeffer as a martyr for the faith, even though he was Lutheran. As someone in a Catholic Bible study I used to attend once said, "Everyone is a Catholic after they die." I certainly don't think everyone in Heaven was a Catholic in this life. I also don't think every Catholic in this life ends up in Heaven, but that's a topic for another blog post.

Famous Hat