Sighing in Astonishment, Weeping with Joy: Feeling the Power of the Lotus Sūtra in Medieval Chinese Miracle Tales

This paper considers what the overt depictions of emotion and invitations of readerly affect in medieval Chinese Buddhist miracle tales can tell us about how early Chinese audiences received Buddhist sacred texts. While much scholarship has focused on the tales’ didactic dimensions, as informative testimonies to the power of devotion to sūtras and the mechanics of karma, less has been said about how these texts “work” toward their explicit goal of transforming its audiences into devotees. I argue here that by staging melodramatic encounters with sūtras, depicting characters’ experiences of fear, grief, illness and so on being changed into “tears of joy” by the wonderworking of Buddhist sacra, miracle tales understand the transformative power of sacred text to be chiefly affective, and attempt to induce such dispositional transformations in their readers and hearers. No mere lessons in metaphysics, these narratives propagate dharma through hair-raising and tear-jerking; by galvanizing emotional bodies.