Barlaam and Josaphat - Joseph Jacobs

Excerpt from Barlaam and Josaphat: English Lives of Buddha, Edited and Induced
The fact that by its means Buddha had been, if only informally, canonised a Saint of the Church, would be enough to attract attention to it. But many of the parables enframed in the legend have had a history even more remarkable than the legend itself. As is well known, the Gaskets story of the Merchant of Venice is ultimately derived from Barlaam and Josaphat.
I have for some time been making rather extensive collections for the Introduction to this work, in order to make it a companion study to my treatment of the Fables of Bidpai and AEsop in the same series. But all that I have collected, and much more also, has been put together by Dr. Ernst Kuhn in a contribution to the Abhandlungen of the Bavarian Academy of Science (Munich, 1893). This is one of those erudite bibliographical monographs in which German scholarship excels; and in all those portions of my Introduction, which deal with the bibliographical aspects of the question, and notably in the pedigree and appendices, I make grateful use of Dr. Kuhn's researches.
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