On September 29, 2024, the USC U.S.-China Institute hosted a workshop at the Huntington’s Chinese garden, offering K-12 educators hands-on insights into using the garden as a teaching tool. With expert presentations, a guided tour, and new resources, the event explored how Chinese gardens' rich history and cultural significance can be integrated into classrooms. Interested in learning more? Click below for details on the workshop and upcoming programs for educators.
The Proselytizing Storyteller and Buddhist Miracle Tales in Tang Dynasty China (618–907)
The Stanford Center for East Asian Studies will host a talk by Manling Luo, Associate Professor of Chinese Literature at Indiana University.
Buddhist laymen who compiled miracle tales to promote Buddhism in medieval China were proselytizing storytellers. While claiming to follow the examples of their early medieval predecessors, Tang literati compilers developed distinctive, systematic strategies for presenting their accounts as evidence of Buddhist truths. Such strategies included theorizing in collection prefaces and documenting story sources in epilogues to individual entries. Rather than dismissing such textual strategies as mere fictional devices, I analyze their underlying assumptions to reveal the storytellers’ nuanced understandings of storytelling networks and practices. I argue that despite their religious agendas, proselytizing storytellers constituted an important part of the culture of informal storytelling in the Tang period.
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