Saint Josaphat · the Buddha canonised by accident

Follow one word through six languages. Sanskrit bodhisattva → Middle Persian Bodisav → Arabic Būdhāsaf, where a single dot misplaced turns it into Yūdasaf → Georgian Iodasaph → Greek Ioasaph → Latin Josaphat. The story travelled with the name: a prince shielded from all suffering, who sees it anyway and renounces a kingdom. By the eleventh century it was a Christian saint's life; Barlaam and Josaphat were entered in the martyrologies, given a feast day, and venerated for centuries. The Buddha was canonised as a Catholic saint, under a corrupted spelling of his own title, and nobody noticed until the nineteenth century. The Hebrew branch of that same tree is Ibn Ḥasdai's Ben ha-Melekh ve-ha-Nazir — which puts the Buddha's life on Jewish bookshelves in Catalonia around 1230, in the exact decades and the exact region that produced the first Kabbalists. Ideas cross borders in disguise, and arrive without their papers.