The Making of a “Romantic Legend”: From Beal’s English Translation of the Fo benxing ji jing to Arnold’s The Light of Asia

In 1875, Samuel Beal published an abridged English translation of the Fo benxing ji jing 佛本行集經 under the title The Romantic Legend of Śākya Buddha, bringing this Chinese Buddhist scripture into the English-speaking world as a “romantic legend.” Through a comparative reading of the Chinese original, Beal’s translation, and Edwin Arnold’s The Light of Asia, this article examines how the Buddha narrative was romanticized through translation and poetic rewriting in the Victorian period. Through his title and paratexts, Beal encouraged readers to approach the scripture as the legend of an ancient holy man; yet his abridgement, prose rendering, and philological inquiry weakened the temporal depth and narrative power of the original. Drawing on Beal’s translation as an important direct source, Arnold adopted and expanded the benxing 本行 mode of narrative organization, recasting love stories and acts of compassion. By aestheticizing impermanence and desire, he transformed the impetus for renunciation into a deeply felt awareness that love and beauty must eventually pass away. This process of romanticization gave the Buddha narrative new literary power, brought Victorian understandings of romantic love, compassion, and holy figures into the Buddhist narrative, and helped shape the modern Anglophone image of the Buddha as gentle, compassionate, and rich in human feeling.