Ben ha-Melekh ve-ha-Nazir · the Prince and the Ascetic

Abraham ibn Ḥasdai's Hebrew romance, made from an Arabic Bilawhar wa-Būdhāsaf: a king is told his newborn son will renounce the world, so he raises the boy inside a palace where nothing old, sick or dead may be seen; the prince gets out, meets suffering, meets an ascetic, and leaves everything. Twenty chapters of parable follow — the man in the well, the three friends, the trumpet of death — and Jewish readers loved it for four centuries in edition after edition. Nobody involved knew it was the Buddha's life. The chain runs Sanskrit → Manichaean Middle Persian → Arabic → Georgian → Greek → Latin, and one branch of it → Hebrew, in Barcelona, around 1230 — the same city, the same generation, as the earliest Kabbalists of Catalonia. This is the closest the two traditions came before the twentieth century, and both sides missed it completely.