Telling tales
Buddhist miracle tales and our tradition of storytelling
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These pages will continue to evolve throughout 2026.
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Rather than exclusively illustrating what clergy did or were supposed to do, Buddhist tales demonstrate the actual application of precepts and values in various aspects of daily life and practice throughout the society.
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Buddhist popular tales sit in the intersection between didactics and entertainment. They contain some of the most fundamental Buddhist teachings, but in order to be effective in capturing attention and delivering the message, they illustrate those teachings in ways that involve the emotions, make the content memorable, and connect abstract ideas with concrete, everyday life.
The Buddhist storytelling tradition is as old as Buddhism itself. Beginning with the avadanas of India, mixing with the zhiguai (tales of the strange) and biographical traditions of China and emerging in Japan as bukkyou setsuwa, Buddhist tales, like the teachings themselves, have adapted to the cultures in which they found themselves, taking on the language, artifacts and style of their new surroundings while retaining the core ideas of karmic consequences, the power of Buddhist practice, and the necessity of faith. Stories play an important part in any religious life and practice, and serve as a vital complement to more academic teachings. They provide the emotional context for the intellectual aspects of practice, encouraging listeners to let down their guard and concentrate on what's being said, and helping them turn their attention from themselves to the sangha that exists throughout space and time. Without lecturing, these tales show how the teachings play out in the encounters, decisions, work and relationships that make up daily life. They connect intangible ideas and concepts with tangible elements and events, and intersect the past in which these stories purport to take place with the present and future by creating a base of group memory in the sangha, passing down and carrying forward shared values and a common history. Walter Ong argues that in oral cultures, knowledge remains "close to the human lifeworld." Rather than constructing broad, abstract systems of intangible information, oral cultures work with and value the knowledge that arises directly from lived experience. In other words, all information is related to human action. The Buddha lived and taught in just such an oral culture; the Nikayas were not written down until just a few years before the Common Era. Until that time, they were preserved in the memories of the monks and disseminated through public recitation. The Buddha enjoined his followers not to accept ideas simply because they are received from a teacher but to try them out for themselves and see whether or not they are true, and he refused to discuss speculative topics unrelated to the immediate project of awakening. In other words, he and his teachings, too, remained "close to the human lifeworld." Although they have received some academic attention and some English translations are available, Buddhist tale literature seems to be largely unknown to modern Western Buddhist practitioners. This is most unfortunate, because the diversity of our transplanted practice can make it difficult to build a common culture, and one of the most important roles these stories have historically played is in the building of community. For the first time in history, all of the various streams of Buddhism are coexisting in a single geographic area, and having originated on the other side of the world, migrated through neighboring cultures, engaged in syncretism, and finally appeared in the West, they contain myriad elements that are trying somehow to find their place side-by-side in the system. Each of these elements emerged because of an underlying basic human need; changing or doing away with a particular element does not do away with the need from which it arose. Stories provide some insight into those needs by showing us our shared human condition and illustrating the working of the dharma in our lives. The setting may be ancient India or medieval Japan, but as readers or listeners we have no trouble putting ourselves in the place of a protagonist who loves his children, wonders about death and the afterlife, struggles with his work or studies, is faced with a seemingly inexplicable event, or aspires to awaken. From an anthropological standpoint, tale literature provides an important perspective that often seems to go missing in Western practitioners' grounding in Buddhist studies: that of the devout laity. Some stories are about the clergy, and some do set out to establish the powers of particular clerics in order to position their temples deserving of financial or imperial support. Many others are the stories of laypeople who demonstrate that obstacles can be overcome through steadfast faith, observance of the precepts and wholehearted practice. Often their example is designed to lead others to begin or deepen their own practice. Since these stories were aimed at the laity, rather than novices training to be clergy, it was important to focus at least some of them on characters with whom the audience could directly relate and to deliver messages relevant to them. The tales illustrate popular Buddhist culture in a way that sutras, hagiographies, temple regulations and academic histories do not, and thus provide an important complement to them. Rather than exclusively illustrating what clergy did or were supposed to do, Buddhist tales demonstrate the actual application of precepts and values in various aspects of daily life and practice throughout the society. As Minh Tranh and P. D. Leigh state in the preface to their collection of Buddhist parables, "As with most stories, these parables can be read on many levels, for many ends. Whatever his background, whatever his purpose, we hope the reader will always keep in mind two crucial principles: the Bodhi Mind and serious practice. Without practice, and without the determination to achieve Buddhahood for the benefit of all sentient beings (Bodhi Mind), parables merely feed the intellect and may become, in the words of D. T. Suzuki, "mere bubbles." [Sutra Translation Committee of the United States and Canada, Thus Have I Heard: Buddhist Parables and Stories. Published for free distribution. NY, NY 1999. pages i-ii.] |
Why are we reading and talking about Buddhist miracle tales? Why are they important for us as practitioners? They combine entertainment and instruction; they transmit and transform the teachings.
At the time they were written and shared, they helped to build a community of shared experience among Buddhists in China and Japan. They illustrated the teachings in a sensory way, and provided examples of effective practice and its results, and they also give us today a window into Buddhist cultural history and lay practice. That’s important because in the West we can fall into what John McRae calls the “string of pearls fallacy.” Because we don’t have a background in Buddhist cultural history and we have so few translated texts from which to work, we tend to build our image of practice out of the stories we hear about a few elite monks. We assume that this was the way all of our ancestors practiced, but this is a tiny group of people, and many of the stories about them have been built into legends. It’s an incomplete picture because it doesn’t reflect the average cleric or the average layperson, and clergy practice has historically been very different from lay practice. Miracle tales and other vernacular texts help fill in some of the gaps in our knowledge of Buddhist cultural history. Some genres of Buddhist storiesWhat are the avadanas?
The earliest Buddhist stories, the Sanskrit avadanas, are tales that explain how virtuous deeds from past lives, including the Buddha's, determine the circumstances and experiences in present and future lives. Characters cultivate morality and generosity and engage in spiritual development, sometimes experiencing miraculous events. Showcasing these characters as good models popularized lay Buddhist practice. What are zhiguai?
One of the most important Chinese sources of miracle tales was a genre called zhiguai, or tales of the strange. Zhiguai were written in a plain, straightforward style, which is in keeping with their intention of being accurate records of unusual occurrences, and they usually cite specific times and places and other details in order to make them credible. These were not considered to be fictional stories but real reportage. Learn more here. What is bukkyo setsuwa?
From China, zhiguai made their way into Japan, and some of them were adopted into a genre known as setsuwa bungaku, or “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. Learn more here. Helpful context for the stories |
