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SignS from the UnSeen realm and Buddhist Miracle Tales 17 nists are midlevel officials like Wang himself. This is hardly an accident. nor does it allow us to conclude that such officials and their families were the only lay practitioners of Buddhism in china at the time. But what it does point to is the likely sources of most of his stories. Wang must have learned of the stories he collected through networks of narrative exchange in the decades leading up to the 490s. it is to those networks that i now turn. Miracle Tales and the Communities That Exchanged Them in this section i will make three points: the stories found in Mingxiang ji were mostly compiled by Wang yan from various sources, not invented by him from whole cloth; they were collectively fashioned by many parties; and most of them are accounts of events claimed to have happened to one or more named individuals. i begin with this last point. Early medieval chinese Buddhist miracle tales constitute, as i said above, a subset of the genre known as zhiguai, or “accounts of anomalies.” one particular feature of the miracle-tale genre must be made clear at the outset to avoid misunderstanding: the stories are not parables or fables; like fables, they are marshaled to make doctrinal or moral points, but unlike fables they are not presented as having been made up for this purpose. Rather, each story claims to represent someone’s personal experience as relayed via a relatively short chain of transmission. Each, that is, to use (somewhat loosely) the terminology of folklore studies, is a memorate:63 a second-, third-, or fourth-hand narrative of events portrayed as having happened to someone in particular, and (i would add) a narrative that engages issues of sufficient importance to sustain the interest of narrative communities across multiple links in the chain of transmission.64 Ethnographic accounts afford a closer glimpse than most historical 63. i here cite a few folklore studies i have consulted, although some of them strike me as conceptually confused: Dégh and Vázsonyi, “The Memorate and the proto-Memorate” (i follow this article in expanding the category “memorate” beyond first-person narratives); Dégh, Legend and Belief; Tangherlini, “it Happened not Too Far from Here”; and Honko, “Memorates and the study of Folk Beliefs.” one of the founders of folklore studies, c.W.von sydow, apparently imagined it possible for there to be purely personal narratives that had nothing “poetical” in them, with “poetical” elements being added later by other narrators. i reject this dichotomy. The key differentia for my purposes is not whether an account is “poetical” or not; all stories are “poetical” all the way down. It is, instead, a matter of how close an extant version of a story is to parties personally present at or involved in the recounted events. is the account connected by a chain of personal relations and narrative exchanges to the perceived events themselves and the circle of people involved in the event, or is there no such connection? This connection is important, in my view, not because it allows us to reconstruct “what really happened” but because it allows us to tie a story to a particular community of narrators and audiences who regarded it as at least a possibly credible account of events. 64. on the interest that is necessary to sustain the exchange of narratives, see below and Barbara smith, “narrative Versions, narrative Theories.” 18 SignS from the UnSeen realm and Buddhist Miracle Tales materials of the initial formation of memorates; their connection to specific , local beliefs and practices; and how they are sometimes taken up by writers for translocal dissemination. i here present one example. although this one is unusual, as memorates go, for its reflexive quality (in that the eventual recorder of the memorate is also its protagonist), we will see further on that its reflexive quality makes it an appropriate choice for our purposes. in the 1970s, an anthropologist, stanley Brandes, wrote of a fieldwork experience he had in a village in the state of Michoacán, Mexico. chatting with two friends while waiting for a baptism service to start in a nearby church, he offered them each a cigarette, then took one for himself. after lighting their smokes, he used the same match to light his own, muttering, “This means bad luck, but i’ll do it anyway.” asked to explain his statement , the anthropologist said that some...

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