The project Barlaam and Josaphat: Buddhist Narratives in Islam and Christianity (BNIC) aims to collect, edit and study all the major – and many minor – versions of the Barlaam and Josaphat literary complex (BJ). It also serves as a hub of BJ studies cross-linguistically and cross-culturally.

 

Our main focus is to publish a multilingual digital edition of BJ which is able to incorporate all known versions. This is a challenge not only for traditional book format publication, but also for digital publication. We are currently working on a comparative edition of the core historical texts (Arabic, Georgian and Greek). This edition is the Barlaam and Josaphat Library (BJL).

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In addition, we have several projects developing Digital Humanities (DH) tools to both present and analyze this very complex text tradition. The versions of BJ vary not only in language and length, but in genre and style, culture and religion, etc. Presenting this in a coherent way is an interesting challenge for both philology and for DH.