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Date Posted: 01:21:36 11/01/03 Sat
Author: Hendrik - 17 Sept 2003
Subject: Christ in Kashmir? -- Origins of the Yuz Asaf legend

I wanted to add some interesting facts on the other popular legend dealing with Jesus staying in Kashmir after the crucifixion. Here is an abstract of the respective chapters in Grönbold's book:


The Issa-legend has its origin in early Manichaeism. Manichaeism came into being during the Third Century A.D., at a time when Buddhism was the predominant religion in India. Mani - the founder of Manichaeism - lived in India for some time before he returned to his homeland Persia.

The ethical teachings of Manichaeism are influenced by Buddhist ideas and some of their legends passed around in the early days of the former movement are actually of Buddhist descent. One of them - a Bodhisattva legend - told of a prince who spent his childhood isolated in the royal palace. As an adolescent he came into contact with ill, old, and dying people which prompted him to become an ascetic.

Of course this legend was centered around the historical Buddha, Prince Siddharta Gautama. In some old texts Mani himself is called Bodhisattva - Bodisaf in Persian.

Later this legend was adopted by other religions; for instance Islam knew of a prince, converted to Islam, called Budhasaf, Yudhasaf, or Yuzasaf - all Arabic corruptions of the word "Boddhisattva".

In the Seventh Century this legend was taken up again by Christianity, by one St. John Damascene who transformed it into a Greek Novel. Here the Indian prince Josaphat (another corruption of "Boddhisattva"!) converts to Christianity after being witness to suffering, old age, and death. This Josaphat was even canonized by the Vatican in 1583, but recently purged from its list of saints because meanwhile there is little doubt that he was not a historic person. This version of the story was very popular in many countries, there is even a German medieval epic drawing from the same legend.

Back to Islam. In one of the Islamic versions of the Budasaf legend, "Bilauhar wa-Budasaf", the converted prince dies as a saint in Kashmir. According to Indian tradition Buddha died in Kuúinagara/Kusinâra, and this was probably confused with the similar sounding Kashmir by the people who created the Arabian version of the legend.

It also happened that when in the 14th Century Islam found its way to Kashmir a hitherto Hinduistic tomb was at once declared to be one of an Islamic prophet instead, and soon popular belief identified this prophet with the legendary Prince Budasaf.

Six hundred years later Ghulam Ahmad, a man of Punjabian origin and founder of the religious Ahmadiyya-movement rewarmed this legend. In 1891 Ahmad declared to be both Messiah and Mahdi, later he claimed to be Mohammed who had returned. When he saw that too many Muslims rejected this idea he changed his ideas and claimed to be the returned Christ. In 1904 he revised his role another time and announced to be an incarnation of Krishna.

In 1899 he published a book in which he elaborated on his idea - conceived from an "intuition" - that Jesus had survived crucifixion by the help of a wondrous oil (which Ahmad himself offered for sale!) and went to Kashmir where he discovered the Lost Tribes of Israel and at the age of 120 died and was buried in Srinagar where his tomb would still be available to pilgrimage today.

(In the Koran there is a verse, IV, 157f. which disputes Jesus' crucifixion, however the exact meaning is not clear.)

Interestingly Notovitch had been to Srinagar too, twice - once staying there for six days - but he does not mention a Jesus tomb in his book. He had been in Srinagar in 1887, but apparently twelve years before Ahmad wrote about Jesus' tomb no one had heard yet of the story that Budasaf was Jesus. Notovitch did not doubt Jesus' crucifixion anyway; his claim was that Jesus went to the East in his youth, his 'missing' years.

I should add here that about two decades later, in 1910, Notovitch published another work -- a book on the life of "Issa" in Kashmir. This legend had not yet existed when he had stayed there himself in 1887, but came into being only somewhat later when Ghulam Ahmad made up this story. Apparently Notovitch, wanted to cash in on this story; he - a Jew converted to Orthodox Christianity - had been in serious trouble with the Russian government and been sent to Siberia for some years, and after his return probably run out of money. About his later life little is known; he disappeared from sight a couple of years after publishing his second Jesus book.


Here is a list of the linguistic differences of the Bodhisattva/Yuzazaf name, presented by Grönbold:

Bodhisattva (Sanskrit)
Bodisaf/Pwtysf (Sogdian)
Bodisaf/Bwdysf (Iranian)
Budhasaf/Budasaf (Arabic)
Yudhasaf/Yudasaf > Yuzasaf (Arabic corruption)
Iodasap' (Georgian)
Ioasaph (Greek)
Jewasef (Ethiopian)
Josaphat (Latin)

The nowadays popular split of the name "Yuzasaf" into the two-part "Yuz Asaf" may be an arbitrary linguistic corruption, obviously in an attempt to make it remotely sound like "Yussuf" (Arabic) or "Yeshua" (Hebraic) for Jesus.


The evolvement of this legend which was originally centered around Buddha is really fascinating. The Buddha figure successively got replaced by central figures of other faiths -- like the teacher Mani, a fictitious Mohammedan prophet Budhasaf, a same as fictitious Christian saint Josaphat, and finally Jesus (now called 'Yuz Asaf').

The Buddhistic origins of the Yuz-Asaf legend have been detected by scholars several times, for instance by Ignaz Goldziher in 1910, but this seems to be still little known outside academic circles. There has been so much research on the interrelation between Buddhism and Christianity that already in 1922 a comprehensive bibliography listing these studies was published*.

Hendrik


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* H. Haas: Bibliographie zur Frage nach den Wechselbeziehungen zwischen Buddhismus und Christentum, Leipzig 1922

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