Xuanzang in Picturebooks: A Buddhist Exemplar for Modern Children

The Tang dynasty pilgrim Xuanzang 玄奘 (602–664) is perhaps the most famous monk in Chinese history. The story of his journey to India in search of Buddhist scriptures has been retold and elaborated many times in the centuries after his death. Both his fame and the epic nature of his pilgrimage make Xuanzang a natural subject for picturebooks, including those published by Taiwanese Buddhist organizations.

Drawing on her recent book, Literature for Little Bodhisattvas: Making Buddhist Families in Modern Taiwan, Natasha Heller delivered a talk on how picture book depictions of Xuanzang reclaim him as a model for modern children, considering them alongside other representations of historical monks and within the context of lessons about Xuanzang in elementary textbooks. Expanding outward from stories about Xuanzang, Heller also discussed picture books as an important resource for understanding modern Buddhism.

Prof. Heller is a cultural historian of Chinese Buddhism working in both the premodern period (primarily 10th through 14th c.) and the contemporary era. Her first book, Illusory Abiding: The Cultural Construction of the Chan Monk Zhongfeng Mingben, is a study of one of the most eminent monks of the Yuan dynasty. Her second monograph, Literature for Little Bodhisattvas: Making Buddhist Families in Modern Taiwan, analyzes the rich and inventive corpus of Buddhist children’s literature, showing how authors and illustrators engage with scriptures, commentaries, and visual traditions against a backdrop of the concerns of global modernity. She has begun research for a third book on trees in Chinese Buddhism, which seeks to challenge anthropocentric histories of religion by engaging arboreal temporalities and agencies.