Miracle Tales Research Articles

A Tale of Wonders in Performance: The Precious Scroll of Wang Hua in the Storytelling Tradition of Changshu, Jiangsu, China

Baojuan (precious scrolls) are a type of prosimetric literature in the vernacular language that flourished in the lower Yangzi valley between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most baojuan texts are devoted to religious themes, often involving wondrous figures and events which can be characterized as “supernatural”. The Precious Scroll of Wang Hua (Wang Hua baojuan 王花寶卷) is a comparatively late text centered on the marvelous apparitions leading to the salvation of a lay person. It is a widespread text of the southern “scroll recitation” tradition as it survives in Changshu, Jiangsu, but to date, it has not received attention from scholars of Chinese popular literature and religion. Still, it is important for understanding the origins, development, and functions of precious scrolls and their contribution to the field of Chinese popular religion. The original text of the Precious Scroll of Wang Hua formed ca. end of the nineteenth century, but the present research mainly uses the manuscript version of a modern performer from the vicinity of Changshu (ca. 1995). This narrative combines two major topics of the wondrous manifestation of Bodhisattva Guanyin and the descent to Hell. Both topics can be traced back to the early “miracle tales”. Here, they have been adapted to the local life and cultural setting. The figure of the skeptical and egoistic Wang Hua who initially rejected the injunctions of Guanyin is a type well known to the modern audiences of baojuan. Thus, the supernatural elements serve the purpose of reconfirming traditional beliefs and values in the contemporary society.

Monastics and the Medieval Chinese Buddhist Mythos: A Study of Narrative Elements in Daoxuan’s Ji shenzhou sanbao gantong lu (Collected Record of Miracles Relating to the Three Jewels in China)

Miracle tales are didactic stories related to Buddhist figures, objects, and places that describe supernormal occurrences brought about by acts of great piety and fervent devotion. They present the audience with concrete examples of the workings of karma, while simultaneously setting verifiable historical precedents in a bid to prove the religious efficacy of Buddhism in China. These were also historiographical works, providing a wealth of detail regarding not only religious life and belief in China, but also local lore, politics, architectural trends, and much more. This paper will focus on a text called the Ji shenzhou sanbao gantong lu 集神州三寶感通錄 (T2106), a collection of miracle tales compiled by the seventh-century scholar-monk, Daoxuan 道宣 (596–667 CE). This text is a collection of narratives drawn from literary and epigraphy sources, as well as orally transmitted stories. As a Buddhist figurehead and as the author of many seminal historiographical works, Daoxuan played a central role in the overall localization of this tradition in China. Bearing this in mind, this paper seeks to interpret the “collective images” presented in Daoxuan’s collection of miracle tales, those representations of the miraculous and the supernormal.

Supersessionist Time and the Turn of Synagoga in the Northern Homily Cycle and Rawlinson Versions of the Theophilus Legend

This article explores three understudied Middle English versions of the popular anti-Judaic Marian miracle tale of Theophilus. I demonstrate how these versions of Theophilus draw upon widely known medieval imagery of Ecclesia and Synagoga to depict Theophilus's journey as one of soteriological regression. A comparative analysis of the two related Northern Homily Cycle versions of Theophilus demonstrates how Synagoga is evoked in the portrayal of Theophilus's despair, which is shown to be a supersessionist issue in his misunderstanding of the Holy Spirit and Trinitarian theology. These two versions then depict Theophilus engaging with Davidic lineage in relation to Marian power, the manner of which unsettles the Christian supersessionist project of the texts and, I argue, earns him physical retribution. I show how these insecurities are resolved in the later Rawlinson version of Theophilus with an invocation of Synagoga in her "return" to Christianity, taken from eschatological readings of Song of Songs 6:13.

John Trevisa’s Information Age: Knowledge and the Pursuit of Literature, c. 1400

John Trevisa’s Information Age: Knowledge and the Pursuit of Literature, c. 1400

Guidance through seduction: the Precious Scroll of Fish-Basket Guanyin in the recitation practice of Changshu in Jiangsu, China

ABSTRACT The story of Bodhisattva Guanyin with a Fish Basket (or Fish-monger Guanyin) has already attracted attention of scholars of Chinese literature and religion, as it represents an indigenous modification of the Indian Buddhist deity; but until now scholars mainly have studied textual variants of this story in the late imperial period. At the same time, the precious scroll (baojuan) devoted to the story of Fish-Basket Guanyin is still recited by local performers in the Changshu city area in Jiangsu now. The analysis of the Yulan Baojuan 魚籃寶卷 [Precious Scroll of Fish-Basket (Guanyin)] in the context of “telling scriptures” in Changshu allows a demonstration of the special features of functioning of a Chinese Buddhist narrative in the local religious-oriented storytelling. The Precious Scroll of Fish-Basket Guanyin formed around the nineteenth century, but it used much earlier materials, originating in the Buddhist “miracle tales”. This text attests to preservation of connections between the baojuan literature and Buddhist narratives in the later period. In the local variant of this precious scroll the story of Bodhisattva Guanyin is combined with the veneration of local tutelary deities, placed on the “family altars”; thus representing the secularized “grass-root” form of Chinese Buddhist devotion.

Dominican Resonances in Medieval Iceland. The Legacy of Bishop Jón Halldórsson of Skálholt

Dominican Resonances in Medieval Iceland. The Legacy of Bishop Jón Halldórsson of Skálholt

Hongzan’s Maitreya Belief in the Context of Late Imperial Chinese Monastic Revival and Chan Decline

This paper shows that the early Qing Chinese Buddhist monk Zaisan Hongzan’s belief in Maitreya and Tuṣita Heaven pure lands, as reflected in his collection of miracle tales and biographies, should be understood in a broader socio-religious context of Chan decline and monastic revival in late imperial China. It is important to notice that instead of advocating for the combination of Chan and Amitābha’s Pure Land of Bliss practice, Hongzan proposed the most severe criticism of the Chinese Chan tradition since the Song dynasty. Through both his personal doctrinal writings and the narrative strategies applied in his Tuṣita Heaven miracle tales, Hongzan vividly displayed his concerns about literary Chan practice and argued for the pivotal and urgent need for Vinaya among monastic communities. Hongzan’s personal anti-Chan sentiment and his intention to reestablish the study and practice of Buddhist Vinaya disciplines in a time of alleged “crisis” of Chinese Buddhism strongly influenced how he composed and transcribed eminent monks’ biographies related to the cult of Maitreya and Tuṣita Heaven. A “hagiographic” reading of Hongzan’s miracle tale collections is necessary to understand his religious discourse in this special historical stage in China.

Morska przygoda polskich pielgrzymów: relacja i alegoria (Vita maior sancti Stanislai, caput 49)

This article presents the narrative strategy employed by Wincenty z Kielc (Kielczy) in Vita maior sancti Stanislai, a text written shortly after the canonization of St. Stanisław. Its aim was to strengthen the cult of the Kraków bishop; the tales of miracles performed by the holy martyr were supposed to sound credible. They were also intended to incline readers (listeners) to pious reflection of a more general kind. At the hands oWincenty, a realistic tale of the dangers of a journey by sea undertaken by Piotr, a relative of the hagiographer, is transformed into allegory. The author, well‑versed in Dominican sermonizing, aims to convince readers that in what seem banal events, the „power and greatness of God” are manifested. God works through the mediation of St. Stanisław in what was for contemporary Poles the exotic circumstances of a maritime disaster.

The making of a local deity: the Patriarch of Sanping’s cult in post-Mao China, 1979–2015

ABSTRACT This article explores how local Chinese authorities employed various strategies to promote the Patriarch of Sanping’s cult in post-Mao China from 1979 to 2015. It argues that the cult of the Patriarch of Sanping became an invented tradition for expanded religious tourism in Pinghe County in Zhangzhou, Fujian Province. Local state agents employed various placemaking strategies to promote Sanping Monastery and endorse the deity’s efficacy, creating an opportunity for resources to be channeled from other parts of China, Taiwan, and overseas Chinese communities to develop Pinghe County. This study shows that, on the one hand, local state agents have propagated miracle tales to entice devotees to visit and make donations to this monastery while, on the other hand, they have courted scholars, journalists, and tour guides to generate attention and interest in the cult. Overall, this article demonstrates how local government placemaking and marketing strategies have contributed to the transformation of a Buddhist master from a local deity to a popular god in contemporary China.

ЛЕСТНИЦА ДО НЕБЕС: ЧУДО В КАРТИНЕ МИРА БУДДИСТА-ПАЛОМНИКА (V-VII ВВ.)

Miracle tales are often found in the texts of Chinese pilgrims who visited India in the 5th – 7th centuries. The role of “miracle” in the world outlook and the text of Buddhist pilgrim looks also structurally determined. One can trace a certain consistency in “embedding” stories of miracles into the overall structure of the text. Being associated with various sacred objects these stories form stable relationships with them and each category of shrines (stupa, statue, cave, etc.) has its own stories about the miracles. The obvious function of “miracles” marking the places of events of the sacred past is to “overcome” the length of time which separates past and present, what looks typical for mythological way of thinking. Miraculous phenomena connect the devotee with the sacred time of the tradition, include him in the attraction zone of deeds of the remote past, make it possible to tangibly feel an impact of the past. In that impact, the degree of holiness of the doer of ancient deeds recognized by the adept as well as the degree of his approach to a world of the true, are of decisive importance in this influence. The possession of “supernatural powers” (ṛddhi) is one of the topics on which attention is also focused in the narratives of the pilgrim.

Labours of Love: Gender, Work and Devotion in Medieval Chartres

Abstract The medieval cathedral of Notre-Dame of Chartres is famous for the depictions of artisans in its thirteenth-century stained-glass windows. Using gender as a lens through which to view these images makes clear that the work they depict is overwhelmingly undertaken by men. In contrast, women’s work, in the form of preparing textile fibres, is depicted in a series of stone carvings on the exterior northern portal of the cathedral. Here physical labour is juxtaposed with acts of reading and prayerful contemplation. Miracle tales from Chartres emphasise connections between gendered work and devotion to the Virgin Mary. This article considers these visual and literary depictions of labour at Chartres in the contexts of historical gendering of work, medieval ideas of divine cosmic order, and the role of work as religious devotional practice within a prevailing emotional regime.

Religion as Financial Asset: State Investments in Chinese Buddhism

This study uncovers reasons why Buddhist sites in China since the time of Mao have received government patronage, and it argues that economic development at Buddhist sacred sites has resulted in religious revivalism—a perhaps unintended consequence of state support. The focus of the work is at Mount Putuo—the home of the Bodhisattva Guanyin—and data collected come from fieldwork during the summers of 2012 and 2013. The first portion of the study examines the various ways individuals have sponsored Buddhist sites through Chinese history and identifies the upholding of miracle tales, the financing of temples and the creation of religious commodities as particularly significant. The second portion of the study examines and evaluates contemporary financing, especially the processes of commodification that shape sacred sites like Mount Putuo. At the conclusion of this article, the author argues that Buddhist practice today has not been hindered by economic development but instead revived.

The Bishop Murderer

ABSTRACTThis article presents and discusses a parchment fragment in the Royal Library in Copenhagen (Fragment Collection, no. 3230), a single folio of a now lost manuscript. It contains a miracle tale about a bishop murderer, a story that can also be found in the famous edifying work Consolation of the Soul. The medieval Danish translation of Consolation of the Soul – Sjælens trøst – is extant in two separate pieces (Ups. C 509 and Holm. A 109) of what was once a single manuscript. The two separate pieces do not, however, make a whole and part of the Sjælens trøst manuscript is missing. However, the Copenhagen fragment is not part of this missing piece. In fact, it belongs to an entirely different text tradition – Étienne de Bourbon’s Tractatus de diversis materiis praedicabilibus – and is a remnant of a translation of (part of) this collection of exempla. As such, it is a significant addition to our knowledge of medieval preaching in Denmark and the use of vernacular translations of continental, Latin didactic material in exempla.

Mary Saves the Man-Eater: Value in the Medieval Ethiopian Marian Miracle Tale of "The Cannibal of Qəmər"

An important trend in scholarship is attending to the metamorphoses of particular folktales across regions, periods, and religions, tracking what such changes reveal about the direction of cultural transmission. Part of this trend is looking beyond circulation in Europe to circulation across south-south boundaries, or even from south to north, the latter of which I have done much to try to forward. In this essay, however, I consider an instance of ostensible Europe-to-Africa textual transfer: the body of folktales that circulated around the medieval world about miracles performed by Saint Mary, the mother of Jesus. The Ethiopian Marian tales, which appear in a compilation text titled Täˀammərä Maryam (Miracles of Mary), are sometimes mistakenly said to have arisen solely in Europe. To explore the issue of influence, I examine a Marian tale innovated in Ethiopia titled "The Cannibal of Qəmər" (or "The Miracle of the Man-Eater" or "The Story of Belai"). Reading the cannibal tale diachronically, relationally, allegorically, and intertextually reveals much. The Marian tale template first devised in the Levant persists across multiple boundaries yet was radically adapted in Ethiopia, underscoring why care is required when discussing African narrative adaptation of outside texts.

“The Huacas of the Spanish”: Expressions of Indigenous Religion in the Mythologies and Aesthetics of Colonial Andean Religious Sculpture

Early scholarship on the colonial arts of the Andes assumed that the Spanish conquest and its accompanying missionary activity resulted in a complete destruction of Inca artistic tradition, and that the indigenous conception of art and representation had little to no effect on works produced during the colonial period. Since then, scholars have recognized a tremendous amount of indigenous influence on the stylistic, iconographic and representational aspects of colonial art forms. My paper examines the influence of two aspects of indigenous culture in particular, identified by the words huaca (sacred thing) and qillca (surface decoration), which were used by the Quechua, an Andean indigenous ethnic group, to describe religious objects in the pre-Hispanic era. They were then in turn appropriated and discouraged by colonial missionaries in an attempt to make their imported Catholicism more understandable to new converts. In examining the multiple, ambiguous meanings of these words in the minds of the Quechua people and colonial missionaries as evidenced in contemporary sermons and miracle tales, I will argue that they influenced the indigenous conception of colonial religious statuary. I will then conduct a visual analysis of ‘The Virgin of Cocharcas’, an 18th century Peruvian ‘statue painting’ (two dimensional depiction of a statue) to demonstrate how concepts of huaca and qillca influenced the aesthetics of colonial statuary.

Miracle Tales as Scripture Reception: A Case Study Involving the Lotus Sutra in China, 370–750 CE

Reception theory argues that meaning resides not in texts but in readers’ encounters with them. What would it mean to take this notion seriously in limning the authority and power Buddhist sutras were regarded as possessing in pre-Song China? In addition to the usual suspects (commentaries and doctrinal discourses), we have copious quantities of texts belonging to a pair of genres that have not been sufficiently examined as evidence for how sutras were received there: so-called miracle tales and biographies. Using narratives concerning the Lotus Sutra as examples, this article is a preliminary inquiry into the modes of sutra reception these works provide evidence of and themselves constituted. Ultimately, many people of most social strata saw sutras not just as doctrine delivery devices but as living entities, powerful platforms for activating divine responses to earnest devotional action. In construing the sutras in this way, Chinese people were not misreading the sutras: instead, they were taking seriously the promises and self-statements made in them.

Quán Thế Âm of the Transpacific

Bodhisattvas are an essential element of the Pure Land branch of Mahayana Buddhism practiced in Vietnam and its diaspora. Many Vietnamese lovingly refer to Bodhisattva Quán Thế Âm as a “gentle mother,” and the circulation of her name and image constitutes a spiritual geography of the transpacific in distinctly Buddhist terms. Through a reading of two miracle tales, I argue that Quán Thế Âm mediates the divergent histories of Vietnamese refugees without dissolving the historical structures of difference that separate the diaspora from the homeland. Devotion to the bodhisattva should thus not be seen only in terms of Mahayana doctrine but also as the embodiment of an alternative ethics of how Vietnamese refugees make sense of their place in the aftermath of war.

Literary Territories: Cartographical Thinking in Late Antiquity by Scott Fitzgerald Johnson

Reviewed by: Literary Territories: Cartographical Thinking in Late Antiquity by Scott Fitzgerald Johnson Adam H. Becker Scott Fitzgerald Johnson. Literary Territories: Cartographical Thinking in Late Antiquity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. xiv, 195. $74.00. ISBN 978-0-19-022123-2. Scholars of late antiquity have a double responsibility, an apparently paradoxical task, when they have to explain the relationship of their sources to classical antiquity. As classicists with a long view, we have to demonstrate the difference Christianity did not make, while also clarifying how Christian doctrines developed and what real difference Christianity did in fact make. As Johnson puts it, “in many ways late-antique thought is a challenge to classicists precisely because it uses the same toolkit and yet comes up with very different answers to perennial ancient questions” (137). According to Johnson, “[i]n Late Antiquity, the inhabited world, the oikoumenē, became a thematic metaphor for literary endeavor and was especially prominent in the aesthetic of encyclopedism that characterizes much late-antique writing” (1). Encyclopedism, like the thinking behind cartography, is a way to organize the world: “[L]iterature in Late Antiquity operates in the same way that a map operates. These two intellectual tools are engaged in ‘the same project’: the codification and interpretation of the world.” However, knowledge and its representation are inevitably imprecise despite the semblance of order offered by such tools of organization. This applies to the encyclopedia but also, according to Johnson, to cartography and geographical knowledge. Just as the encyclopedia is an arbitrary construction arranged by the alphabet, so also the map is an order imposed, “and one can see the order, even where not explicitly stated, through its effects on the reader” (10). Chapter 1, “Pilgrimage and Archive,” argues that the works of Pausanias in the second century and the Christian pilgrim Egeria in the fourth have a “shared aesthetic of the ‘archive.’” Despite their similarities, Egeria points to new trends and she “is a linchpin of this project, standing as she does between the ancient tradition of travel literature or ‘sacred tourism’ and the full-fledged Christian pilgrimage genre” (27). Numerous examples of the “archival aesthetic” are then offered in chapter 2, “An Aesthetic of Accumulation,” which provides a classified survey of texts in which “the shape of the physical world became a fundamental literary metaphor for the organization of knowledge itself” (29). According to Johnson, “The world in literary form became a container for the archive of knowledge of the past.” He later underlines the big picture significance of his survey when he claims that “when this aesthetic of accumulation is recognized as a creative force in late-antique, Byzantine, and medieval literature, the old juggernauts of ‘decline’ and literary epigonality lose much of their power” (60). Chapter 3, “Locus Amoenus/Loca Sancta,” examines the late fifth-century Life and Miracles of Thekla. Looking back to Homer and Herodotus, Johnson underlines how geographical knowledge can be “a structural element in the ‘poetic anthropology’ of all literature and thought” (62). In this chapter, he offers “close readings of a series of miracle tales in which the geographical framework of the story is central to how they are written” (63). The rooting of Thekla in Seleukeia, vis-à-vis both the universal and the regional, helps to “orient the reader in relation to the work and allow him or her to enter into the reality of miracles which the author is trying to describe” (66). Chapter 4, “Apostolic Geography,” focuses on Christian topographical literature and the contemporaneous increase in writing on the apostles in the fourth and fifth centuries. In chapter 5, “The Westwardness of Things,” Johnson [End Page 289] discusses the geographical emphases of two ninth-century East Syrian (“Nestorian”) authors. Both Thomas of Marga and Isho‘denaḥ of Basra rooted their histories of monasticism in the movement of monks between East and West. Johnson emphasizes that “the role of geography in the formation of Syriac genres” needs to be better appreciated in its relation to “the assumptions of author and audience about the shape of narrative and the tradition of writing as they are revealed in the text itself” (129). Johnson concludes with a brief discussion...

Reading the Prioress's Tale in the Fifteenth Century:

Abstract This article considers the fifteenth-century circulation of Chaucer's Prioress's Tale outside of the Canterbury Tales in devotional anthologies. It examines three specific manuscripts—London, British Library MSS Harley 2251 and Harley 2382, and Manchester, Chetham Library MS 6709—in which the tale appears as one of a series of texts devoted to Marian devotion. From this context, we argue that in the fifteenth century Chaucer enjoyed a reputation as a Marian poet, and that two of his famous immediate successors, Hoccleve and Lydgate, engaged with his reputation on precisely this ground. The article finishes by reading two Marian miracle tales written by Hoccleve and Lydgate as self-conscious responses to the Prioress's Tale.

Memories and Strategic Silence in Jodoji engi

Jodoji engi, begun in 1372, records the history of a small temple established in 1192 on the grounds of Obe estate in Harima province. This article will compare the engi's account of the temple's founder Chogen and his successor Kan'amidabutsu, and of the construction of the temple itself, with documentary records. We note the engi's emphasis on the wondrous and miraculous rather than on the temple's role in land reclamation and estate supervision that the documents stress. We also examine the engi's silences, particularly in regard to violent confrontations between Jodoji monks and Obe estate's proprietor, Todaiji, and the estate's local managers beginning in the 1290s. The documentary record has little else to say about Jodoji after the 1220s; and the engi does not fill us in. We will ask what picture of the temple the engi's compilers were trying to project through what they chose to record and to omit.KEYWORDS: Jodoji-Chogen-Kan'amidabutsu-Obe estate-Todaiji-jishu-cultural capital(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)AT THE END of the twelfth century in Harima province (present-day Hyogo prefecture), the monk Chogen ... (1121-1206) founded the small temple Jodoji ... on the grounds of Obe estate ..., a holding of the great Nara monastic complex Todaiji ... Although Chogen was then working to reconstruct the Todaiji facilities that had been incinerated in battle fires in 1180, he established Jodoji as a bessho ..., to be independently funded and free of Todaiji control. A colossal Amida triad ..., installed in the temple's Jodo Hall ..., is generally attributed to the famed Buddhist sculptor Kaikei ... (active 1183-1236).1 Both the original Jodo Hall and the triad can be seen today.Jodoji was founded by a famous monk, graced by a famous sculptor's magnificent images, and heavily involved in the development of an important landholding, and so one would expect it to have a well-documented history. However, there is very little concerning Jodoji in the extant documentary record between Chogen's death and 1292, when it reappears in a very different role, as adversary of the Obe estate proprietor and on-site management in a violent quarrel that lasted at least until 1303. Thereafter, despite substantial documentation of the estate itself in the interval, we hear little more about the temple until it reappears near the end of the fifteenth century as the beneficiary of privileges conferred by provincial warlords.The temple's history and its founding traditions, however, are recorded in an account now known as Jodoji engi, the oldest extant copy of which is dated 1614. Like many engi, this text combines apparently factual material about the temple's structures, rituals, and history with legends and miracle tales. In this article, we will compare the engi with documents that include petitions to the court, instructions to provincial officials, and depositions in lawsuits, as well as other historical sources such as memoirs and collections of tales. We will ask how the engi fleshes out the history of the temple, and why and how certain elements made their way into the engi. We will explore the gaps in the historical record in both documents and engi-gaps that can be characterized as intentional silences-and suggest some reasons why the engi developed as it did. In particular, we will focus on the conflict at the end of the thirteenth century, asking how it shaped the way in which the engi was written and assembled.Engi, Documents, and Cultural CapitalEngi are not documents (monjo ...), but rather, they are attempts to tell the story of a particular shrine or temple, depicting it in a favorable light to attract support-perhaps in the form of donations or political backing. Yet medieval documents often do the very same thing, and like engi, need to be scrutinized skeptically. While engi are replete with miracle tales and accounts of the supernatural, such elements are hardly absent from documents. …