July 2013 – Page 2 – purple motes

Borzuya's autobiography compared to Augustine's Confessions

In sixth-century Persia, the royal physician Borzuya wrote a short, scarcely known autobiography. Borzuya’s autobiography describes an inner struggle like the “contest of self and against self” in Augustine’s famous fourth-century Confessions.[1] Borzuya’s and Augustine’s highly literary inner struggles are similar. But, unlike Augustine, Borzuya did not clearly find a healed self in a well-defined new life.

Borzuya sought more lasting goods than worldly riches and pleasures. According to Borzuya, gold disappears and silver is stolen: such goods are like vapor rising from a pot and dissipating in the air. An excellent character, a good name, and good works have enduring value. Borzuya instructed himself:

O my soul! look not at the wealth of the rich, or at knotted bridal chambers and ornamented harems. … O my soul! care for the sick, support the weak, relieve the distressed. [2]

The transience, decay, and changeability of the temporal world are themes in Sassanian court literature.[3] Zoroastrianism encouraged doing good works to gain credit in the coming, eternal world. So too did Christianity. Concern for eternal goods animates both Augustine’s Confessions and Borzuya’s autobiography.

Like Augustine, Borzuya vacillated between choosing a life of worldly pleasures and a life of piety and asceticism. Borzuya recounted:

When I perceived these miseries which attach to the world’s pleasures and enjoyments, which pass away like a dream in the night, my soul hated them. They were accounted in my eyes as dung. And I thought I would be an ascetic or hermit, for his occupation is excellent and his portion good, his innocence is desirable, and his ways are without snares. … Then my mind, from the intelligence which is implanted in nature and resides in the brain, brought to remembrance what happens to him who guides his steps this way of ascetics: bodily weakness which affects beings made from dust; and many trials, varied troubles, and lurking enemies. Those enemies thirst for his ruin, and contend with him without ceasing. Then there is the fear that this poor, weak person would not persevere, but be overcome by force of suffering and multitude of trials. He would turn back his face in defeat and become a laughing-stock among his brethren and the derision of his friends, and I should lose all the excellent things which I had amassed …. [4]

In this remarkably self-conscious passage, Borzuya brings to mind appealing and frightening aspects of an ascetic’s life. His imagination of the ascetic’s difficulties slips into the first person. His imagination seems colored with the importance of honor to Borzuya as the leading physician to the Persian king, and with his own lack of self-confidence.

Borzuya’s self-conflict appears in two contrasting stories of a dog with a bone. The first story figures Borzuya leaving his position in the Persian court to seek greater goods:

{I could be} like the dog who once passed by a pond with a bone in his mouth. Seeing the bone’s reflection in the pond, he thought that another bone was in the water. Descending to the water, he let the bone fall out of his mouth. He got nothing but distress and want.

On the other hand, perhaps Borzuya misperceived the appeal of his current position:

{The delights of him who is attached to pleasures} resemble a bare bone, void of all juiciness. A dog takes it that he may taste it. As long as he keeps hold of it, and splinters it with the strong grasp of his teeth, his mouth is filled with his own blood. When he tastes the blood which flows from his mouth, he tightens his grasp and bites the bone all the more firmly, and it hurts him more severely.[5]

Just as do the wisdom books of Hebrew scripture, the wisdom that Borzuya acquired from Indian sages encompasses contradictions. Borzuya personally recognized these contradictions.

Borzuya represented the contradictions of his will in a story of a judge. Borzuya explained:

I was like the judge to whom two suitors applied about the same matter and with the same object and contention. After the first suitor had told his story, the judge pronounced him innocent and his opponent guilty and confuted. Then the second suitor told his story. That story differed from the first’s story. Then the judge condemned the first, whom he had acquitted before, and acquitted the second, whom he had earlier pronounced guilty.[6]

Borzuya’s autobiography embeds seven such reversals within Borzuya’s consciousness. They occur as Borzuya ponders following the religion of his parents, searching further for wisdom, and leading a life of asceticism or pleasure.

Within Borzuya’s autobiography, the story of a pearl borer highlights moral ambiguity. A merchant hired the pearl borer to bore precious pearls for 100 dinars a day. When the pearl borer entered the merchant’s house, he saw a cymbal. Rather than working and without the merchant objecting, the pearl borer played the cymbal all day long. At the end of the day, the pearl borer asked for his wages. In a tenth/eleventh-century Syriac manuscript of the autobiography, the merchant declared:

Through a weak will, were you not overcome by the love of amusement, so as to spend the whole day in vanity, which impoverishes, like the steam which ascends from a pot and vanishes in the air, when its place is known no more?

In later Arabic manuscripts, the pearl borer argued:

I have done exactly what you ordered. I was employed by you, and whatever you requested, I obliged. [7]

In the Syriac manuscript, the pearl borer doesn’t get the 100 dinars. In the later Arabic manuscripts, he does. The later Arabic manuscripts seem to have incorporated a change in the story’s ending.[8] The story has ambiguous moral typing. The changed ending shows an effect of that ambiguous typing in the course of the text’s transmission.

Within Borzuya’s autobiography, a story of a married woman and her paramour represents harmful deliberation. In this story, a married woman dug a tunnel behind a water jar to give her paramour covert access to her house.[10] One day when the woman and the paramour were together in the house, the husband arrived at the outer door. The women told the paramour to escape quickly through the tunnel behind the water jar. When the man came to the mouth of the tunnel, he found that the water jar had been taken away. He returned to the woman and told her, “I did not find the water jar in the place you told me.” The woman responded:

O unlucky fool, what have you to do with the water jar? Wretched man, do you not know that I placed the jar so that you should recognize the spot, and know where to find the door of the tunnel through which you came in?

The man countered:

Since the water jar was not there, you need not have said anything about it, because it confused me and made me think that I did not know, and delivered me into the hand of justice, which will take vengeance on me for having done wrong.

The woman sensibly replied:

Cease from your folly and answering back, and make haste and save yourself, lest I be put to shame as well as you. [11]

They continued arguing, blaming each other, until the husband arrived. The husband then beat the paramour severely.[12] Borzuya, struggling within his own conscience, apparently recognized the possibility of harm from continuing, inconclusive deliberation.

Both Borzuya and Augustine lived in societies with vigorously conflicting belief systems. Augustine felt the competing attractions of Manichaeism, pagan hedonism, neo-platonism, and Christianity. All these beliefs systems, as well as Zoroastrianism and Indian religions, were active in sixth-century Persia. Manichaeism particularly affected Augustine. It was almost surely a stronger competitor to Christianity in Burzoya’s sixth-century Persia than it was in Augustine’s fourth-century north Africa. Manichaeism emphasizes dual forces of good and evil structuring the cosmos. Both Borzuya and Augustine brought worldly conflict within their personal consciousnesses.

Borzuya’s autobiography and Augustine’s Confessions have different literary relations to Christian scripture. Augustine, a former professor of rhetoric in Milan, became a Christian bishop. He quoted Christian scripture extensively in his Confessions. Borzuya’s autobiography doesn’t quote Christian scripture.[13] But Borzuya’s autobiography makes use of illustrative stories much like the Christian gospels do. Actors in these stories are human, not animals as in the Indian fables of the Panchatantra. Moreover, both Borzuya’s autobiography and the older account of his journey to India feature explicitly interpreted stories much like Jesus’ explications of parables.[14]

Christians appreciated Borzuya’s Kalilah wa Dimnah from its creation. A Persian-Christian church official living about Borzuya’s time made a translation into Syriac of Borzuya’s middle-Persian work.[15] In the tenth or eleventh century, another Persian-Christian, who despaired of the contemporary behavior of Christian priests and the Christian church, made another Syriac translation from an Arabic version of Borzuya’s work.[16] In addition to Borzuya’s explicitly expressed dissatisfaction with the parochialism of religious teachers and religious institutions, Kalilah wa Dimnah contains many stories morally dubious from a Christian perspective. Borzuya’s struggle and quest were sufficiently attractive to Christians to offset his life and work’s challenges to Christianity.

Medicine and healing were central to both Borzuya’s and Augustine’s life paths. Augustine addressed god as “my inner physician”: “thou are the physician, I am the sick man.”[17] As a scholar and a royal physician in sixth-century Persia, Borzuya almost surely was aware of Christian medical claims. Ignatius of Antioch, who died about 108, described the Christian Eucharist as “medicine of immortality, and the antidote which prevents us from dying.”[18] According to a separate account of Borzuya’s journey to India, Borzuya sought in India medicine of immortality. He did not find such medicine.

Burzoya’s inner struggle did not end in a coherent, well-institutionalized new life. Borzuya declared in his autobiography that he sought truth from “scholars and leaders in every religious fraction.” His findings were discouraging:

I discovered that all of these people merely repeat what was handed down to them. Each one praises his own religion and curses the religion of those who disagree with him. It became clear to me that their conclusions are based on illusions and that their speech is not motivated by a sense of fairness. In not one of them did I find that degree of honesty and rightmindedness which would induce rational persons to accept their words and be satisfied with them.[19]

Those findings leave Borzuya spiritually apart from other persons and institutions. According to the separate account of Burzoya’s journey to India, Burzoya’s journey “led him to piety and asceticism.”[20] Borzuya’s autobiography ends on a note of warning: the story of a man in a well, in danger of dropping into the mouth of a dragon. Borzuya’s autobiography does not clearly lead to a specific new way of life, or even to a clear commitment to such a life.[21] Compared to Augustine’s Confessions, Borzuya’s closely related autobiography speaks more directly to divided selves who do not find Augustine’s new faith, self, and city.

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Notes:

[1] The phrase “contest of self against self” is from Augustine, Confessions, bk 8, ch. 11, from Latin trans. Outler (1955) p. 108. Borzuya may have read Augustine’s Confessions. Christians were well-established in sixth-century Persia. Paul the Persian, a Christian theologian and philosopher, participated in the court of the Persian King Khosrau I. Borzuya, who was a scholar as well as a physician, was also part of that court. Khosrau welcomed Hellenistic thinkers and received in Ctesiphon philosophers expelled from Athens. Blois describes the religious skepticism in Borzuya’s autobiography as common among Greek intellectuals of that time. Blois (1990) p. 32.

[2] Borzuya’s autobiography in Kalilah wa Dimnah, from Syriac trans. Keith-Falconer (1885) p. 251. The Syriac text was translated from Arabic in the tenth or eleventh century. Nöldeke (1912) provides a German translations of Borzuya’s autobiography based on early manuscripts. The corresponding text in English translation:

O soul, let me not be deceived by riches and honors … O soul, stick to your work, treat the sick

Trans. from id. p. 13. Knatchbull (1819) obscures Borzuya’s self-address to his soul. Id. is an English translation based on Silvestre de Sacy’s 1816 Arabic text. That Arabic text is from the Paris manuscript arabe 3465 as well as some other manuscripts. Regarding arabe 3465:

this codex is certainly not one of the better copies of our book. Many authentic passages are missing from it, while many others appear in a badly corrupted form.

Blois (1990) p. 3. Jallad (2002) is based on Sacy’s text, as printed in Egypt in 1817 (Bulaq imprint).

[3] Shaked (1984) pp. 53-9. Id. p. 77 notes “the positive attitude towards human activity in this world” in Zoroastrian religion.

[4] Trans. Keith-Falconer (1885) p. 259-60. Here and in subsequent quotations from the Syriac translation, I’ve adapted the text’s style in translation to make it more readable. A subsequent similar passage worries that the ascetic would:

be in fear lest you be vanquished by the sufferings, when they befall you, and succumb to the trials, when they attack your weakness, and you stand in great shame before your brethren and kinsmen, and become a laughing-stock to all your acquaintances.

Id. p. 61.

[5] Id. p. 260 (including previous quote).

[6] Id. p. 261.

[7] Syriac text: id. p 259. Arabic text: trans. Jallad (2002) p. 71. Nöldeke (1912), p. 19, provides a similar translation based on a variety of early manuscripts.

[8] Nöldeke (1912), p. 19, n. 5, laments that the “morally pedantic Syriac translation” gets the story wrong and gives the worker nothing. To the contrary, giving nothing to the worker who plays the cymbal (lute in the surviving Arabic manuscripts) is more consistent with Borzuya’s ascetic ponderings. Moreover, the Syriac text appears to be from the tenth or eleventh century. It is appears to be the earliest surviving witness to the Arabic text. Keith-Falconer (1885) p. lix, Blois (1990) p. 5. The earliest surviving Arabic manuscript (Azzam manuscript) was completed in 1221. The next earliest Arabic manuscript (Shaykhu manuscript) was completed in 1338. Id. p. 3. Scribes modified Kalilah wa Dimnah manuscripts over time:

A comparison of the various manuscripts reveals at once such a degree of discrepancy that one must often wonder whether they are really copies of one and the same book. It appears that the Arabic Kalilah wa Dimnah has to a large degree become a victim of its own popularity. For one thing, the frequent reading of the book insured that all the old copies were rapidly worn out and had to be replaced. For another, editors and copyists felt free to alter the text, to add new stories and rewrite old ones, to combine material from various manuscripts, and so on, in a way which would have unthinkable in the case of a “serious” work, say on theology.

Id.

[10] In a tale in the 1001 Nights, ‘Ubaid’s wife shows similar initiative in securing the construction of a tunnel to allow Qamar al-Zaman to tryst with her. See Night 972, from Arabic trans. Lyons (2008) v. 3, p. 630.

[11] Trans. Keith-Falconer (1885) pp. 257-8 (previous three quotes). Jallad (2002) omits this story. Knatchbull (1819) pp. 72-73 provides an English translation from the Silvester de Sacy’s Arabic text. Nöldeke (1912), p. 18, provides the story in German from early manuscripts.

[12] The text makes no mention of action against the wife. Then and now, violence against men is considerably more frequent than violence against women. If the paramour had obeyed the woman’s commands, he would have avoided punishment.

[13] The Syriac translation quotes scripture. See trans. Keith-Falconer (1885) p. 257. Cf. Matthew 12:13. The Syriac translations clearly includes interpolations. Id. pp. 264, 265. Quotations of Christian scripture in the Syriac translation almost surely are interpolations.

[14] Borzuya’s formulates an allegorical interpretation of the concluding tale of the man in the well. See, e.g. id. p. 266. In the older version of Borzuya’s journey to India, Borzuya complained to Indian sages that his books’ account of Indian medicine to revive the dead were wrong. The Indians sages studied their books and confirmed Borzuya’s account. However after considering the matter at length, “they found something like an interpretation of it in special books of wisdom.” The interpretation was an abstracting allegory of Borzuya’s quest and circumstances:

Those mountains are the sages and scholars. Those shrubs and plants are the wisdom which god has caused to be implemented in their hearts. The medicines which were described are the books of counsel and the books of learning. The dead who are brought back to life with these medicines are the ignorant among men who have no knowledge …

Trans. Blois (1990) pp. 80-1.

[15] Keith-Falconer (1885) p. xliii. A fourteenth-century eastern Christian author listed the translator as “Bod the periodeutes.” A periodeutes is an eastern church official ranking below a bishop. Bod wrote other books: “Discourses on the Faith,” “Against the Manichaeans,” “Against the Marcionites,” and “Greek Questions.” His name indicates that he was Persian. Blois (1990) p. 2.

[16] Keith-Falconer (1885) provides an introduction, English translation, and notes to that text. For the translator’s despair, see id. pp. 264-5. Nöldeke (1912) p. 27 is similar.

[17] Augustine, Confessions, bk 10, ch. 28; bk. 10, ch. 3, from Latin trans. Outler (1955) p. 108.

[18] From Ignatius of Antioch, Epistle to the Ephesians, Ch. 20.

[19] Trans. Blois (1990) p. 26, based on Nöldeke (1912) and additional review of manuscripts. The literature contains some dispute about whether this text should be attributed to Borzuya. Blois argues strongly that it should be. The overall themes of Borzuya’s autobiography, as discussed above, support that position.

[20] Trans. Blois (1990) p. 82.

[21] Borzuya concludes:

I resolved to be content to remain as I was, and to perfect my course of action as much as I was able, that perhaps in after life I might happen on a time when I should meet with a guide for my path, a power to rule my soul, and one who would order my affairs; and in this state I remained.

From Sacy’s Arabic text, trans. Keith-Falconer (1885) p. 312. Nöldeke (1912), p. 27, is similar. The Syriac text has a lacuna, but it also appears to be consistent with the above.

[image] Borzuya and an Indian sage. From Bodleian Library Kalilah wa Dimnah, transcribed by Muhamad ibn Ahmad in 1354 (Pococke 400).

References:

Blois, François de. 1990. Burzōy’s voyage to India and the origin of the book of Kalīlah wa Dimnah. London: Royal Asiatic Society.

Keith-Falconer, I. G. N, ed. and trans. 1885. Kalilah and Dimnah: or, The Fables of Bidpai: being an account of their literary history. Cambridge: University Press.

Knatchbull, Wyndham, trans. 1819. Kalila and Dimna, or, The Fables of Bidpai. Oxford: W. Baxter for J. Parker.

Jallad, Saleh Saʻadeh, trans. 2002. The fables of Kalilah and Dimnah. London: Melisende.

Lyons, Malcolm C. 2008. The Arabian nights: tales of 1001 nights. vols. 1-3. London: Penguin.

Nöldeke, Theodor. 1912. Burzōes Einleitung zu dem Buche Kalila waDimna. Strassburg: K.J. Trübner.

Outler, Albert Cook. 1955. Augustine: confessions and enchiridion. Philadelphia: Westminster.

Shaked, Saul. 1984. “From Iran to Islam: notes on some themes in transmission 1. ‘Religion and sovereignty are twins’ in Ibn al-Muqaffa’s theory of government. 2. The four sages.” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 4 , pp. 31-67, reprinted as Ch. VI in Shaked, Shaul. 1995. From Zoroastrian Iran to Islam: studies in religious history and intercultural contacts. Aldershot, Great Britain: Variorum.

Old French fabliaux in modern English translations

Fabliaux are short, comic tales in verse written in Old French from roughly 1150 to 1350. Modern English translations of fabliaux exist in a variety of books. The online Archives de littérature du Moyen Âge (ARLIMA) provides much bibliographic information about fabliaux, but the information is not structured as a dataset. To aid further study of fabliaux, I’ve created a fabliaux bibliographic dataset for modern English translations of fabliaux.

You can use the fabliaux bibliographic dataset as an index to modern English translations. Given an Old French title for a fabliau, the fabliaux translations index indicates page numbers of modern English translations of that fabliau in published collections of fabliaux in English translation. For example, Dubin’s recent book, The Fabliaux, contains English translations of sixty-nine fabliaux. But it doesn’t have a fabliaux index. If you want to find Dubin’s translation of La Dame Escoilliee, you have to scan through his book’s table of contents. With the fabliaux bibliographic dataset, you can easily look up the title in an alphabetical title index by the first key word (“dame” for this title) and see the page number in Dubin’s collection.[1] Moreover, the same line also indicates page numbers for other modern English translations of that fabliau in other published collections.

You can also use the fabliaux bibliographic dataset critically. It shows collections of fabliaux translations in relation to each other. It also shows those collections in relation to the overall corpus of fabliaux. Fabliaux chosen for translation and their ordering in a collection of translated fabliaux provide insight into translators’ perspectives on fabliaux and interest in reading fabliaux.

Across the seven major collections of fabliaux in English translation, four fabliaux were translated five times each. These most popular fabliaux in translation are:

Du bouchier d’Abevile
De Brunain la vache au prestre
La borgoise d’Orliens
Berengier au lonc cul [2]

All four fabliaux depict men being robbed, beaten, and/or humiliated. Berengier au lonc cul tells of a man being coerced into kissing the ass of a woman. The fabliau La Gageure seems to respond to such depictions of ass-kissing. La Gageure is not presented in any of the seven major collections of fabliaux in English translation.

The first fabliaux in Dubin’s collection is Du con qui fu fait a la besche. Only one other fabliaux collection has an English translation of Du con qui fu fait a la besche. That other collection is a scholarly work clearly intended for academic readers. Dubin’s work, in contrast, has much more popular packaging. Publishing Du con qui fu fait a la besche first in Dubin’s collection suggests that this fabliau has become much more attractive.[3]

The leading appearance of Du con qui fu fait a la besche in Dubin’s collection may indicate the growing importance of the literature of men’s sexed protests. Du con qui fu fait a la besche is a rather crude reworking of the Genesis account of the creation of woman. In contrast to many other fabliaux, this fabliau presents a false image of domestic violence (that false image has become a stereotype today). More importantly, this fabliau describes women’s propensity to talk. That’s a common observation in the literature of men’s sexed protests. Propensity to talk seems to be associated with women’s social superiority. In addition, Du con qui fu fait a la besche concludes with these observations:

they’ve {women have} destroyed many good men,
who’ve come to grief and been disgraced
and lost what wealth they once possessed. [4]

These concluding observations echo down through the ages to the persecution of Charlie Chaplin and the imprisonment of men impoverished and unable to pay child-support debts. Medieval scholars, with their new embrace of transgressive works, seem to be crossing boundaries, interrogating and unsettling discourse, and problematizing naturalized social injustices.

Update: I’ve added additional sources to the fabliaux bibliographic dataset. They change slightly the statistics cited above.

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fabliaux bibliographic dataset (also available as an Excel workbook)

Notes:

[1] The Old French fabliaux title list in the fabliaux bibliographic dataset is from the ARLIMA list, augmented with the Old French titles of any additional tales included in collections of fabliaux in English translation. ARLIMA’s individual entries for fabliaux show in some instances multiple Old French titles for a given fabliaux. In most cases, variant titles have common key words. If you can’t find the title of an Old French fabliaux in the fabliaux bibliographic dataset, you should consider variant titles. Consider also whether Nouveau recueil complet des fabliaux doesn’t categorize that particular tale as a fabliaux. Various authorities count from 130 to 160 tales as fabliaux. The fabliaux corpus in the fabliaux bibliographic dataset currently consists of 136 fablaiux.

[2] See translation frequencies in the fabliaux bibliographic dataset. I define a major collection as a work that contains five or more fabliaux in modern English translation. For bibliographic citations for these collections, see source identifiers.

[3] Dubin’s collection is based on the Old French texts in Willem Noomen’s Nouveau recueil complet des fabliaux. The other collection that includes Du con qui fu fait a la besche is Raymond Eichmann and John DuVal’s The French fabliau: B.N. Ms. 837. Its title indicates well its academic orientation. The French fabliau: B.N. Ms. 837 follows the fabliaux ordering adopted in Nouveau recueil complet des fabliaux. Dubin’s collection has a new ordering. That ordering may be based on an approach like that for making textual choices:

Noomen seeks to produce as close a text as possible to that of the original author; I looked for the version that pleased me most.

Dubin (2013) “Translator’s Note,” p. xxx. Dubin’s collection oddly doesn’t include Le lai d’Aristote. That tale is included in four of the seven major collections of fabliaux in English translation.

[4] Dubin (2013) p. 9. Dubin comments:

there are limits to {the fabliaux’s} daring. When we consider what is missing, for example, even the sexually explicit fabliaux strike us as almost prudish by today’s standards. The man is invariably on top but for one comic exception, oral sex is entirely absent, and the rare instance of same-sex relations are all misunderstandings. Their moral stance is thus at once conservative and rebellious.

These comments are somewhat misleading. Anne Ladd’s pioneering and scarcely known statistical analysis of fabliaux indicates that fabliaux depict women winning in over 50% of male-female conflicts. Cited in Johnson (1983) p. 298. The absence of oral sex in the fabliaux isn’t a major weakness. Other medieval literature presents men’s protests against oral sex that doesn’t fully meet many men’s needs. With enlightened reading, fabliaux present major challenges to current academic conservative morality.

References:

Dubin, Nathaniel. 2013. The fabliaux. New York: Liveright.

Johnson, Lesley. 1983. “Women on Top: Antifeminism in the Fabliaux?” The Modern Language Review. 78 (2): 298-307.

incarceration of child-support debtors in Massachusetts

Debt imprisonment still exists for child-support debtors. According to a recent survey of county sheriffs, persons committed from the Massachusetts Probate and Family Court to incarceration facilities numbered about 800 per year from 2009 to 2011. Almost all of these commitments to incarceration are likely to have been ordered for child-support debts. About twenty-five times more men than women were incarcerated. That’s consistent with the large gender bias against men in financial child-support orders plus apparent additional gender bias in propensity to incarcerate for child-support debt.

The Massachusetts figure for child-support commitments to incarceration is low relative to the corresponding figure for South Carolina. Massachusetts and South Carolina have about the same number of child-support cases with arrears due. High-quality data for South Carolina indicates that on average during the year 2005, about 1800 persons were in jail for child-support debts. Since jail terms for child-support debt are typically considerably less than a year, the number of commitments to South Carolina jails for child-support debt was much higher than 1800 persons. The Massachusetts figure of about 800 child-support commitments to incarceration per year is probably under five times less than the corresponding figure for South Carolina. That large difference suggests that the Massachusetts figure may be significantly under-reporting the number of persons actually incarcerated for child-support debt.

Many possibilities exist for under-reporting of child-support incarcerations. The Massachusetts child-support incarceration data doesn’t include data for the Boston Municipal Court. The Boston Municipal Court’s jurisdiction includes paternity and child-support actions. Incarcerations from that court apparently weren’t counted. Sheriffs reported the number of incarcerations. Incarcerations can proceed from a sheriff executing a warrant. They can also occur as a result of a hearing to which the respondent appears of his or her own volition. Whether the sheriffs counted incarcerations proceeding from the later circumstances isn’t clear. Moreover, persons who are subject to child-support orders and are jailed are required to continue to make child-support payments while they are in jail. That’s difficult in many cases. Thus persons jailed on other charges can be kept in jail because they accumulate child-support arrears while they are in jail. These persons are also effectively incarcerated for child-support debt.

Incarcerating persons for child-support debt is unjust and counterproductive. The U.S. has 2.2 million persons in jails and prisons. U.S. per capita incarceration is among the highest in the world and far higher than other high-income democracies. Debt imprisonment is a particularly bad use of incarceration. Persons incarcerated are deprived of opportunities to earn money to pay off debts. Moreover, imprisoning child-support debtors deprives children of the most important form of child support: their parents’ loving physical presence in their lives.

The highly disproportionate imprisonment of men for child-support debt exacerbates deep gender inequalities. Men have no reproductive rights. Men have financial fatherhood legally forced upon them for doing nothing more than having consensual sex and being confronted with unplanned biological parenthood. Legally forcing financial fatherhood on men is bad enough. Imprisoning men who find themselves buried under child-support debts is even worse. Men who aren’t the biological father of the child can suffer such incarceration through both direct paternity judgments and default paternity judgments. An additional injustice is the lack of public discussion of these issues. The public silence is an astonishing and revealing social feat.

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Data: incarcerations from Massachusetts Probate and Family Court, 2001-2011 (Excel version). Terry Brennan, an independent justice researcher, painstakingly requested and compiled these incarceration data. He deserves honor and praise for his public service.

Wednesday's flowers

flower photograph by mushroom photographer Elmer Galbi

Borzuya seeking to revive the dead produced Kalilah wa Dimnah

Borzuya on voyage to India to find medicine to revive the dead

In the mid-sixth century, the Persian physician Borzuya journeyed to India in search of medicine to revive the dead. Borzuya was the leading physician to Persian King Khosrau Anushirawan. He came from an elite family, had a scholarly education in medicine, and was respected as a scholar and a sage as well as a physician.[1] Borzuya’s journey seeking medicine to revive the dead indicates that reviving the dead was a reasonable interest in professional medicine in the ancient world. The outcome of Borzuya’s journey was unexpected: he delivered to Anushirawan the still-famous book Kalilah wa Dimnah and turned to a life of piety and asceticism.

Reports that certain physicians could revive the dead circulated in the ancient world. Christians regard Jesus of Nazareth as a physician in the sense that healing the sick was a central aspect of what Christians believe that Jesus did. Christians believe that Jesus rose from the dead and could raise others from the dead. Jesus did not, however, achieve professional success among physicians of his time. Jesus never was appointed to a position of medical authority, acquired no wealth from practicing medicine, and was crucified as a criminal.

Other physicians in the ancient world were also associated with claims of success in reviving the dead. At least five accounts of physicians reviving the dead have survived in ancient literature not clearly understood to be mythic. Just as for Jesus, these accounts seem to be associated with an effort to gain recognition for the greatness of particular physicians. Neither Jesus nor other physicians who reportedly revived the dead had elite social standing. While these other physicians weren’t crucified, none of them secured well-recognized institutional positions of medical authority.

Borzuya’s journey to India shows interest in reviving the dead from a learned physician holding a high office. A sixth-century Persian account of Borzuya’s journey declares:

One day Borzuya submitted to the king a letter in which he mentioned that he found in the books of the sages that in the land of the Indians there are mountains on which shrubs and different kinds of plants grow, such that if they are recognized, and gathered, and blended, then one could extract from these plants a medicine with which the dead are brought to life. He asked the king to allow him to search for them and to aid him by giving him the money necessary for this undertaking and to write letters on his behalf to every one of the kings of the Indians asking them to assist him in his task. [2]

Borzuya described to the king in writing his interest in reviving the dead, related this proposal to learning from books of sages, and described technical aspects of professional physicians’ processing of materia medica. He requested funding for his proposal and proper documentation to allow the project to secure necessary cooperation from other officials. The king responded to Borzuya’s request with similar professionalism:

The king agreed to this and ordered that what he had requested be given to him and he prepared gifts for the kings whom Borzuya was to meet, as was the custom of kings when they sent ambassadors to one another on account of their business.

Securing medicine to revive the dead wasn’t treated as an extraordinary proposal. Borzuya and the king treated that proposal as a reasonable interest of a professional physician acting in a professional way.

After securing funding and necessary paperwork, Borzuya administered his large project with dedicated professionalism. The sixth-century Persian account of Borzuya’s journey declares:

Borzuya set out on this business and paused for nothing until he arrived in the land of the Indians. He handed over the letters and the things which he had with him to every one of those kings and asked their permission to search for that thing on account of which he had come to them. All of them granted permission to do this and they let him go about his search in complete freedom in the whole country and in all of the mountains. And they supplied him with guides, helpers, and instruments.

Borzuya persisted in his search for twelve months gathering the shrubs and plants which grew in those mountains and mixing them with the medicines described in his books and supervising everything diligently and then applying his concoction to the dead, but without seeing any corpse restored to life.

Not getting results is a common fear among scientists who secure a large grant. How will the funder respond? How will the scientist have the credibility to get grants in the future? Borzuya struggled with these universal scientific concerns:

Borzuya began to have doubts about his books and to suspect them and have no faith in what they said. But at the same time it seemed intolerable to him that he should return to the king a failure, a liar, and in error.

Borzuya recognized that the medical profession’s knowledge is ultimate futile. That reality is difficult to recognize socially and would not absolve Borzuya from responsibility for his project’s failure.

Borzuya vindicated his project to revive the dead by pivoting to a different field of knowledge. Borzuya shifted to work on eternal truths of a relatively abstract type. He translated from Sanskrit into Persian wisdom in the form of stories of animals acting like humans. Borzuya thus produced the book Kalilah wa Dimnah.[3] Over the next millennium, that book became widely known and highly influential around the world. By the modern scientific standard of publication influence, Borzuya’s work to find medicine to revive the dead was very successful.

Borzuya’s work on reviving the dead contributed importantly to a different understanding of reviving the dead. Describing books of wisdom as medicines, the Indian sages told Borzuya:

The dead who are brought to life with these medicines are the ignorant among men who have no knowledge, but when they are treated with knowledge and made to understand things and when they make things easy by learning from these books which owe their existence to those scholars, then it is not long until they know and see.

After his journey to India, Borzuya adopted a life of piety and asceticism. He came to know that “the dead could be revived only by that king who is eternal and rules all things.”[4] While Borzuya began his journey as an elite, highly professional physician, he finished it standing apart from the professional and religious institutions of his time. Reviving the dead had become a matter of wisdom and spirituality.

* * * * *

Notes:

[1] These biographic details are from Borzuya’s autobiography in surviving translations of Kalilah wa Dimnah and the short (oldest) version of Burzuya’s journey to India. For an English translation of Borzuya’s autobiograply from a tenth or eleventh century translation from Arabic into Syriac, Keith-Falconer (1885) pp. 248-68. For an Arabic text and English translation of the short version of Borzuya’s journey to India, Blois (1990) pp. 81-7. Keith-Falconer (1885), p. xxvi, states that Ibn Abi Usaibia states that Borzuya was born in Merv and was the personal physician to Anushirawan. That’s not in the entry for Burzuya in HP p. 531. There is no other known surviving evidence directly concerning Borzuya’s life. In scholarly work, Borzuya is variously transliterated as Burzoy or Burzoe (Middle-Persian transliteration), Barzawayh (Arabic transliteration), and Burzuya (neo-Persian transliteration). The transliteration in the Encylopaedia Iranica is Borzūya. I’ve used a slightly simplified version of that transliteration.

[2] Short version of Borzuya’s voyage to India, trans. from Arabic in Blois (1990) p. 81. Id. argues convincingly that this version is a translation of a sixth-century Middle Persian text. Subsequent quotes, unless otherwise noted, are from the short version of Borzuya’s voyage, trans. id. pp. 81-2. I’ve substituted the transliteration Borzuya for Burzoy in the quoted text for consistency.

[3] Kalilah wa Dimnah (known in western Europe as the fables of Bidpai) is commonly described as a translation of the Sanskrit Panchatantra. Blois (1990) shows that Kalilah wa Dimnah is a composite work that draw on Sanskrit works Mahabharata and the legend of Canda Pradyota, in addition to a version of the Panchatantra. From these Indian sources and some Middle Persian sources Borzuya created a Middle Persian version of Kalilah wa Dimnah during the reign of Anushirawan (531-579). Ibn al-Muqaffa (died 756) made an Arabic translation. He apparently added additional material, some of his own composition. The subsequent textual history of Kalilah wa Dimnah is complex. The earliest surviving Arabic text is from the thirteenth century. Text in other languages seem to preserve elements of earlier Arabic translations. Borzuya’s Middle Persian translation has not survived. See Blois (1990). The trial of Dimnah, which ibn al-Muqaffa apparently added to Kalilah wa Dimnah, seems to be based on Middle Persian legal sources. Janos (2012).

Stories from Kalilah wa Dimnah were widely known in medieval Europe through Gesta Romanorum. For example, the longer version of Borzuya’s autobiography includes the story of thieves tricked into believing that they could enter a house on a moonbeam. See, e.g., from Syriac trans. Keith-Falconer (1885) pp. 254-6. That story became Tale 136 in Gesta Romanorum, from Latin trans. Swan & Hooper (1876) pp. 241-2. Tale 119 in Gesta Romanorum (the story of the ungrateful seneschal who fell in a pit with a lion, monkey, and serpent and was rescued by a woodcutter) is also from Kalilah wa Dimnah.

[4] Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, trans. from Persian Davis (2007) p. 705. Ferdowshi wrote his Shahnameh from about 977 to 1010. Blois argues that the version of Borzuya’s journey in the Shahnameh is an adaption of the short version that has survived in later Arabic texts. Blois (1990) pp. 51-7. The Shahnameh version is consistent with the short version’s depiction of Borzuya’s professionalism in seeking to revive the dead. However, the Shahnameh version adds a greater sense of a wonder with respect to reviving the dead. The Shahnameh version has Borzuya declare to the king:

I read in an Indian book that a plant grows in the mountains there that looks like silk from Byzantium. If someone gathers this plant and prepares it in the correct way and then sprinkles it on the dead, they will begin to talk. Now with the king’s permission, I shall begin this difficult journey; I shall employ all my knowledge to see if I can find this wonder.

The king responded, “This is not possible, but we should inquire into it nevertheless.”

The Shahnameh version describes Borzuya testing different plant states and preparations:

He {Borzuya in India} gathered plants that were dry, fresh, withered, or flourishing, and he made various concoctions from them; but when he sprinkled these on the dead not a single corpse came to life, and it was clear that the mixtures were powerless.

Trans. Davis (2007) pp. 704-5 (both quotes above). Blois (1990) convincingly argues that the long version of Borzuya’s journey to India is a later Arabic adaptation and expansion. It replaces the quest for medicine to revive the dead with a quest to get directly the book Kalilah wa Dimnah. The long version is common in surviving Arabic texts of Kalilah wa Dimnah.

[image] Borzuya traveling to India. From Bodleian Library Kalilah wa Dimnah, transcribed by Muhamad ibn Ahmad in 1354 (Pococke 400).

References:

Blois, François de. 1990. Burzoy’s voyage to India and the origin of the book of Kalilah wa Dimnah. London: Royal Asiatic Society.

Davis, Dick. 2007. Firdawsī. Shahnameh: the Persian book of kings. London: Penguin.

HP: Ibn Abi Usaybi’ah, Ahmad ibn al-Qasim. English translation of History of Physicians (4 v.) Translated by Lothar Kopf. 1971. Located in: Modern Manuscripts Collection, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD; MS C 294. Online transcription.

Janos, Jany. 2012. “The origins of the Kal̄ilah wa Dimnah: Reconsideration in the light of Sasanian legal history.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. 22 (3-4): 505-518.

Keith-Falconer, I. G. N, ed. and trans. 1885. Kalilah and Dimnah: or, The Fables of Bidpai: being an account of their literary history. Cambridge: University Press.

Swan, Charles, and Wynnard Hooper, trans. 1876. Gesta romanorum: entertaining moral stories. New York: Dover Publications Inc. (reprint edition of 1969).