from “The Role of Buddhist Monasteries in T’ang Society” by Kenneth K. S. Ch’en in History of Religions, Vol. 15, No. 3. (Feb., 1976):
For the popular [dharma] lecturer [in T'ang China (June 18, 618 – June 4, 907)], four prerequisites were valued : voice, eloquence, talent, and profundity. In other words, he must not only be learned in the law, but he must also possess the voice and eloquence to be a sort of spellbinder, who could amuse the audience and keep them awake with all kinds of stories, anecdotes, and parables. Equipped with clever tongue and smooth language, these popular lecturers were very successful in getting across the message of the Buddha through amusing and entertaining stories.
We are fortunate to have some contemporary accounts of one of the most famous popular lecturers at work, Wen-hsii, who lived during the early ninth century. He is described as an outstanding individual, a monk of great virtue, proficient in chanting the sutras, and possessing a soft pleasant voice which moved people. Ignorant men and fascinated women delighted in listening to him; they filled the monasteries whenever he spoke. However, a Confucian critic charged that he discussed nothing but base and vulgar subjects, and that true followers of the Buddha all ridiculed him. This criticism provides good insight into the nature of the audiences that attended the popular lectures. They consisted mainly of the unlettered and rustic masses, who were delighted in having the message of the Buddha embellished in the earthy and robust vernacular so well understood by them.
These popular lectures were enlivened by a very important literary innovation created by monks in the T’ang dynasty, the pien-wen (or text of marvellous events). A pien-wen is a modified version of a Buddhist sutra consisting of a mixture of prose and poetry. The monks took a short episode in a sutra and expanded it to tremendous lengths by adding all kinds of stories of marvellous events. In so doing, they converted the sutra into an entertaining vehicle for spreading the Buddha’s message. As one example of such expansion, a passage of fourteen characters in the Vimalakirti [Sutra] was increased to 630 characters in prose and sixty-five lines of poetry, each line consisting of seven characters. Probably the best known of these pien-wen is the Mu-lien pienwen, which recounts the adventures of the monk Mu-lien in searching for his mother, who was reborn in the deepest Buddhist hell because of her deceit and avariciousness. We can well visualize the gripping interest with which the audience would follow a master storyteller describing Mu-lien rescuing his mother from hell only to have her reborn as a hungry ghost, then as a black dog, and finally as a deity in heaven.
