Bukkyou setsuwa 仏教説話 : Japanese Buddhist miracle tale literature

Setsuwa were short stories with a moral message and in the case of Buddhist setsuwa, or bukkyou setsuwa, they often centered on karmic retribution.  Like zhiguai, setsuwa were compiled into books and often grouped into maki, or volumes.  Stories were arranged and linked within the maki and within the collection to develop a theme: Story A has something in common with story B, story B has something different in common with story C, and so on.  You can’t really take a story out of context or out of the sequence without losing a lot of the meaning. Thus a story that seems poorly thought out or meaningless by itself makes sense in context.  This is a common system of organizing writings in medieval Asia.  Poems in imperial anthologies are arranged the same way.

We don’t know who wrote most classical Japanese literature – it wasn’t important for people to be known in that way.  It wasn’t necessary to build ego or create identity by being famous for writing—everyone’s place in society was assigned and taken for granted.  Individuation was by perfectly fulfilling your assigned role, so we don’t really know who wrote the miracle tales.

Most of the tales started out as oral stories--setsuwa are “told stories” (as opposed to written literature or chanted texts).  Interestingly, if you look at the kanji or characters for setsuwa, the first one means “rumor”, “opinion” or “theory,”and the second one means “tale.”  Again we see that these stories are supposed to be rooted in fact, something one hears that’s supposed to be true, rather than a work of fiction that was intentionally made up.

The earliest collections in early 9th century emulate Chinese collections and were in fact written in Chinese—the Latin of Heian Japan, and used only by educated and upper class people—so these stories were not “popular literature.”  Later collections were written in Japanese and were more “popular.”  They give a picture of everyday life and people that isn’t found in court literature.  However, setsuwa weren’t written by commoners—literacy in the Kamakura period was confined to elites, who would have been educated samurai, courtiers and the clergy. The scholarship says setsuwa were probably written by aristocrats—these elites started paying attention to commoners and found something interesting about them, and they intended their stories to be read to the illiterate people.  Interestingly, in a time of instability and class conflict, they also intended the stories to be read by the elite, and the authors thought their elite audience would be interested in the same things as the masses, so they didn’t talk down to the audience and they also didn’t confine themselves to elegant subjects.

Setsuwa collections were likely compiled and written as sourcebooks for talks given by the clergy, whether for teaching or for fundraising.  Some stories were existing folktales that were given a Buddhist reading in order to spread religious themes.  At temple festivals there were large crowds of common people, and they were like carnivals, with street preachers explaining the teachings using pictures and stories, which had to be entertaining to draw listeners.  The tales had to be didactically solid, but they also had to be good stories.

Stories related to people’s salvation had more appeal than something esoteric or philosophical, and preachers used simple stories and parables rather than complex profound concepts.  The general emphasis was on plot and dialogue rather than tedious description of scenes and characters, but to make things more realistic they do give plenty of detail.

More to explore

Campany, Robert Ford. Signs from the Unseen Realm: Buddhist Miracle Tales from Early Medieval China. Germany, University of Hawaii Press, 2012.