A Study of a Newly Found Buddhist Narrative Collection : Stories of Devoted Children who Suffered from Loss of Parents

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This research project has focused on a Buddhist narrative collection, which was newly found in Kongo-ji Collection of Sacred Texts, of stories of devoted children who lost their parents. Though these stories share some similar features with Indian Jataka Tales, they are considered to be composed in Japan. With a special reference to the relationship between the composition of Buddhist narrative stories and generation of Buddhist apocrypha in Japan, my research clarified that this collection was accomplished under the influences of the Lotus Sutra and the Golden Light Sutra, in which stories of Bodhisattvas' religious practices in their past lifetimes were narrated in a full length. The results of this research were presented as papers in Setsuwa-bungaku kenkyu, as well as at ICANAS38, among others. At the same time, I developed a study of a different Japanese Buddhist work found in the same collection in Kongo-ji, Hyakugan Shujikan, an important work that shows the concept of Bodhisattva's practices in Heian period. I also used the digital microscope to make a comparative analysis of the paper on which some Buddhist works in Kongo-ji collection were written.