The Konjaku monogatari shu (今昔物語集) is a Japanese anthology dating from the early twelfth century. The original work contains more than one thousand systematically arranged tales from India, China, and Japan. It is the most important example of a genre of collections of brief tales which, because of their informality and unpretentious style, were neglected by Japanese critics until recent years but which are now acknowledged to be among the most significant prose literature of premodern Japan.

It’s the kind of story that displaces other stories, easily sweeps them aside, which is what happened with Dan…

Three stories about how people fill in what they don’t know about strangers.

Stories don’t just kick you over the head with a new idea but they embed these ideas in a richly imagined world. When you read a text, you’re not just influenced by a pet theory some character may be peddling but you’re much more influenced by the kind of world that is being created: what kind of rules does this world follow? A story always has an implicit theory of causality.

If we agree that “illusion” is a negative and the prefix “dis-” a kind of minus sign, then logically and by mathematical analogy “disillusion” and “disillusionment” must be positives, no? And yet in common parlance they’re anything but.

The fact that narratives have the potential to be an “act of social imagination” and serve as the foundation for moral agency fits well into Shabkar’s own understandings of the functions of Buddhist life stories.

This essay explores how Shabkar’s autobiography makes an indirect case for vegetarianism and ethical treatment of animals. By portraying animals as important participants in his stories, Shabkar shifts the focus from a human-centered view to one of impartiality. This approach, an example of the “act of social imagination,”  subtly encourages a vegetarian lifestyle and stands out from other Tibetan Buddhist arguments for vegetarianism. Shabkar’s storytelling invites readers to imagine a more ethical way of living, which helps build the foundation for moral choices.

The weaving together of first- and third-person narration in the JA allows the Buddha to identify himself with the story whilst simultaneously stepping back from it.

Chuchok fits into this genre of “Thai trickster figures.” When you think about the story not from the perspective of Vessantara but from the perspective of the peasantry, think about how amazing it is that a peasant would even think to ask a member of the royal family for their two children to be his wife’s servants! It’s absurd!

The humor and political themes found in the Northern Thai retellings of the Vessantara (Jujaka?) Jātaka.

The oldest known copy of this text at the present time, and possibly also the oldest extant book written in a Thai language, is a palm leaf manuscript with a Chula Sakkarad date corresponding to 1516 A.D. Written in the Tham script, the treatise employs a dual language format consisting of Pali passages followed by their Lan Na Thai equivalents

This dissertation is a scholarly study of the story of the Arhat Maliyadeva, found in its oldest Thai rescension. This story is traditionaly found in the Vessantara Jātaka. Looking at two other later editions, the study examines various meaning and uses of the story in different contexts for different purposes. Also included is a translation of the highly literary Kham Luang (royal version) of the story.

What if each time
you caused pain
a small round stone
was put in your pocket…

This was the genius of our ancestors, that by cutting off the light from this empty space they imparted to the world of shadows that formed there a quality of mystery and depth superior to that of any wall painting or ornament.

A meditation on what was lost when Japan rapidly modernized and traded in its traditional aesthetics for Western appliances.

The demonic female, an object of male anxiety and desire, has long been a stock character in Japanese Buddhist literature. This article examines two female realms in the Japanese literary and visual imagination: Rasetsukoku, a dreaded island of female cannibals, and Nyogogashima, a fabled isle of erotic fantasy.

I trace the persistence and transformation of these sites in tale literature, sutra illustration, popular fiction, and Japanese cartography from the twelfth through the nineteenth century […] until what was once a land of demons south of India was rediscovered as an erotic paradise south of Japan.

The first thing a student of magic learns is that there are books about magic and books of magic.

A reverse myth imagining the re-emergence of magic in 19th-century England.

The mind of man is capable of anything.

A British novel about the “horrors” of colonialism and what Europeans thought about them.

For more about this classic novel, see (for example) the Writ Large Episode on the book and its history.

Never was a scene more desolate. The trees in these regions were incredibly large and stood in scattered clumps over the white wilderness. The vast expanse of snow was checkered only by these gigantic pines and the poles that marked our road.

An exploration of some of the effects caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815, and a reflection on how humans respond to disasters.

This is something of a sequel to Tim Harford’s earlier episode on the unplayable piano.

… the natural world does not function as home or household for its human children. Finding herself and her fellows to be outsiders, trespassers in a world that is distinctly “other,” she declares both nuturing and managerial responses to nature doomed

Against my cheek, my tree was comfort

[T]he great, irreplaceable potentiality of fiction is that it makes possible the imagining of possibilities.

When future generations look back upon the Great Derangement they will certainly blame the leaders and politicians of this time for their failure to address the climate crisis. But they may well hold artists and writers to be equally culpable—for the imagining of possibilities is not, after all, the job of politicians.

This book began as a set of four lectures, presented at the University of Chicago in the fall of 2015. The lectures were the second in a series named after the family of Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin.

We tell a story about ourselves to create our self. And oftentimes we’ll behave in a way that reveals that our story is at least partly inaccurate […] The self is a much more slippery idea than we often give it credit for and that has enormous potential.

… true crime can never be my guilty pleasure because it’s a part of my history.

I am writing to you
from deep in the bad days,
hoping you will hear me
wherever you are

Cindy: not her real name. I met her
in prison, and people in prison I give
the fake names. I taught her Shakespeare…

People are so difficult to be with —
The good ones won’t lead the way, and the bad ones never stop.

We’re already geo-engineering the planet, we’re just doing it accidentally and badly

Ezra Klein has a wide-ranging conversation with novelist Kim Stanley Robinson (of Mars Trilogy fame) about his “cli-fi” book, Ministry of the Future, and how strange our society is.