Page:Buddhist Birth Stories, or, Jātaka Tales.djvu/61

Rh Josaphat, a Greek romance written in the eighth century by St. John of Damascus on the basis of the Buddhist Jātaka book. Translations, poems, and plays founded on this work were rapidly produced throughout Western Europe.

5. Other Buddhist stories not included in either of the works mentioned in the two last paragraphs were introduced into Europe both during the Crusades and also during the dominion of the Arabs in Spain.

6. Versions of other Buddhist stories were introduced into Eastern Europe by the Huns under Genghis Khān.

7. The fables and stories introduced through these various channels became very popular during the Middle Ages, and were used as the subjects of numerous sermons, story-books, romances, poems, and edifying dramas. Thus extensively adopted and circulated, they had a considerable influence on the revival of literature, which, hand in hand with the revival of learning, did so much to render possible and to bring about the Great Reformation. The character of the hero of them — the Buddha, in his last or in one or other of his supposed previous births — appealed so strongly to the sympathies, and was so attractive to the minds of mediæval Christians, that he became, and has ever since remained, an object of Christian worship. And a collection of these and similar stories — wrongly, but very naturally, ascribed to