Representations of the Buddha in Persian Literary Culture: The case of Belawhar wa Buyūzasf

Despite the Arab conquest and the arrival of Islam in Iran and Central Asia from the 6th century, wall scriptures, fragmentary texts and material remains attest to the survival of Buddhism and its practice by a large number of people living in this region until the 14th century. Through the translation movement from Sanskrit, Pahlavi and Greek into Arabic that took place in the first centuries after the arrival of Islam, many dynasties of the Eastern part of Iran continued to support Buddhist scholarship and practice. Aristocrat Buddhist families such as the Barmakids had interest, wealth and political power to hire translators and to prepare new versions of their old literature into Arabic and New Persian. Among the Buddhist Sanskrit texts that were actively sought all over Asia in translation, the life story of the Buddha – the Belawhar wa Buyūzasf received considerable attention and was served as a model for didactic literature. The pre-Islamic Pahlavi version of this tale is extinct, yet rare manuscripts of its Arabic and Syriac renderings are still available, of which certain Persian translations of the story were prepared from the 10th century onwards.
The present paper aims to explore the development and dissemination of the Persian Belawhar wa Buyūzasf and to study the methods through which the story was transmitted, reworked, Persianized and expanded. What was the approach of the Muslim translators towards Buddhism? How was the tale narrated in Persian compared to the original Sanskrit texts: the Lalīta Vistara and the Buddhacarita? What Buddhist elements were retained in the narrative and which ones were eliminated? These are the main questions that this paper aims to answer by studying the story of the Belawhar wa Buyūzasf by ‘Alī Ibn Muḥammad Niẓām Tabrīzī, written in the year 1389 in ornate prose.