Beginning in the 1980s, scholars of early Chinese Buddhist history began recovering the extensive corpus of miracle tales, composed in China from the 4th century CE onward, as a valuable resource for imagining the reception of Buddhism in medieval Chinese society. For much of the field’s history to that point, scholarship had been disproportionately preoccupied with describing the doctrinal interpretation and elaboration of Buddhism by educated, predominantly male Chinese monastics. This enterprise saw the development of Chinese Buddhism as being chiefly the product of intellectual effort, of a particular way of reading and responding to Buddhist sacred texts. Because they were composed and circulated largely by laypeople, on the other hand, and reflect religious life closer to the ground, the medieval Buddhist miracle tales offered an attractive alternative to this parochial approach
The proposed paper joins in the ongoing reappraisal of medieval Chinese Buddhist miracle tale literature to offer new perspective on why these texts are so valuable to historians. Whereas scholarly treatments of the miracle tales to date have focused largely on their didactic dimensions, demonstrating how they sought to convince audiences of the special potency of certain Buddhist sūtras (Stevenson, 1995; Ho, 2019), the reality of unseen beings and metaphysical laws (Gjertson, 1989; Ho, 2017), and how to benefit from such forces through devotional activity (Stevenson, 2009), this paper considers the tales’ pervasive display and invocation of strong emotions. It suggests that Buddhist practice in medieval China, including the telling of these very tales, was understood to be profoundly emotional, and that having certain emotions was seen as vital to spiritual transformation.
In work that brings us close to the proposed paper, Robert Ford Campany (1993) has suggested that the miracle tales derive much of their persuasive power by appealing to the senses, showing in them how Buddhist devotion is rewarded by otherwise unseen forces presenting themselves to the feeling body in “miraculous” acts of healing, rescue from peril, or other clearly embodied displays of power. I go a step further here by observing how regularly such miraculous displays are registered not just by characters’ senses, but in explicitly described emotional experiences—transforming the fear or grief of a suffering protagonist into astonishment and ultimately joyous confidence in the dharma, followed by renewed acts of devotion. Such representations, meanwhile, aim to provoke parallel experiences in their audiences.
To give one example, in a story compiled in the Tang Dynasty Chronicles of the Lotus Sūtra (T 51, 2068), an impoverished, uneducated old woman—blind, deaf, mute, and on the verge of death—is brought to a sermon by her grandson. While the Lotus Sūtra is being preached, he holds her palms together in the gesture of veneration, the merit accrued from which is enough, when she dies shortly thereafter, to warrant the king of the underworld immediately restoring her senses and reviving her. Overjoyed with her healed body, the old woman devotes herself to the dharma as a nun, causing all around her to similarly rejoice.
As I will demonstrate, this vision of intense affect as the foundation of Buddhist devotion—repeated throughout the miracle tale genre—is extrapolated from Mahāyāna scriptures themselves. Indeed, the tales compiled in the Chronicles of the Lotus Sūtra and the related Accounts for the Propagation of the Lotus Sūtra (T 51, 2067) demonstrate a sometimes explicit awareness of that scripture’s “Chapter on the Merits of Responding with Joy,” which describes the extraordinary soteriological benefits of marveling and rejoicing at the dharma. The medieval Chinese Buddhist miracle tales, at least those concerned with the Lotus Sūtra, thus translate a scriptural imperative to be emotionally impacted by Buddhist sacra into the vivid, “real-life” world of medieval Chinese readers and hearers, where it achieves greater affective, transformative potency.
Thus, while it would be absurd to deny the didactic character of such tales—their lessons on the power of devotion to sūtras and the workings of karma—these are no dispassionate lectures, but sensational, nigh melodramatic narratives concerning and inviting transformative experiences of emotion with respect to the dharma. The tales regularly depict conversion to Buddhism as a process affecting bodies, which express its influence in vivid, indeed visceral displays of feeling. Most commonly, characters’ hair stands on end, or they become so overwhelmed with joy that they weep. This embodied, emotional response extends into character’s newly ardent physical practices of recitation, copying, and so on. Whereas the miracle tales depict such reactions in encounters with Buddhist sūtras and their powers, comments from the tales’ editors and compilers confirm the expectation that the stories themselves will earn such responses from its readers and hearers, to thus transform them, in turn, into devotees. In this sense, “didactic” is something of an understatement, or at least is not sufficiently nuanced to describe how miracle tales ask to be received.
Considering in these ways the rich emotional dimensions of the medieval Chinese Buddhist miracle tale genre, this paper argues for the usefulness of “transformation” as a critical term at two related levels of its analysis. On one hand, it lights up how the miracle tales transform the sūtras’ own invitations of readerly emotion into arguably more affecting stagings, in the more familiar and evocative world of medieval Chinese audiences themselves. On the other, the paradigm of “transformation” helps us see these narratives less as dispassionate catechism and more as vehicles of intense emotional change and—ideally—religious conversion expressed through the feeling, acting bodies of their intended readers and hearers.
Ultimately, this paper suggests that medieval Chinese Buddhist miracle tales contributed to the development of Chinese Buddhism by deftly taking up the sūtras’ demands to be encountered and engaged with intense, transformative emotion and presenting them to medieval Chinese audiences in ways designed to elicit just such responses. Through this popular literature, foreign Buddhist media became not merely intelligible to a wide swath of medieval Chinese society, but also emotionally compelling, ideally transforming readers and hearers into ardent devotees. Through such affective provocations, Buddhism came to matter to Chinese audiences.
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.