Event date: 0:00–22:00 (Beijing/Taipei) Saturday, 27 January, 2024
Organizer: Peking University
How might Buddhist storytelling contribute to cross-species thinking in an age of climate crisis? In this talk, Professor Heller examines how animals have figured into Buddhist stories in both the past and the present. Beginning with premodern Chinese sources that show karmic connections between human and animal lives as a means to shape ethical behaviour, she brings this tradition into conversation with contemporary Taiwanese Buddhist picturebooks to show how these sources depict ecological entanglements that go beyond the six realms of rebirth and even the category of sentient beings. She argues that children’s literature represents not only a site of moral formation for future generations, but offers models for how we might tell new stories to motivate change in an age of climate crisis.
Lecture Report: “Our Entangled Others: Buddhism and Multi-species Storytelling”
Yin-Cheng Distinguished Lecture Series
Peking University, January 27, 2024, at 20:00–22:00 (Beijing/Taipei)
Lecture by Professor Natasha Heller (University of Virginia)
Response by Ven. De Yuan (Jing Si Abode) and Dr. Lei Ying (Amherst College)
Report by Tzu Chi Charity Foundation
Supported by the Buddhist Tzu Chi Charity Foundation, this lecture was hosted by the Buddhist Research Center of Peking University as part of the Yin-Cheng Distinguished Lecture Series on Buddhism. Professor Natasha Heller of the University of Virginia delivered the keynote lecture entitled “Our Entangled Others: Buddhism and Multi-species Storytelling.” The respondents were Ven. De Yuan of Jing Si Abode and Dr. Lei Ying of Amherst College. The event was chaired by Professor You Zhao of Peking University, and opening remarks were offered by Professor Wang Song, Director of the Buddhist Research Center of Peking University, and Dr. Rey-Sheng Her, Vice CEO of the Buddhist Tzu Chi Charity Foundation.
Prof. Natasha Heller is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. A cultural historian of Chinese Buddhism, she is the author of Illusory Abiding, a study of the eminent Chan monk Zhongfeng Mingben during the Yuan dynasty. Her second monograph, Literature for Little Bodhisattvas, on Buddhist children’s literature in modern Taiwan, is forthcoming. She is also working on a third project examining the significance of trees in Chinese Buddhism.
Ven. De Yuan is Dharma Master at Jing Si Abode, Chairman of Yayasan Pendidikan Tzu Chi Malaysia, and Chairman of Tzu Chi Foundation Canada. Ordained in 2011, she has spoken at international conferences including the 2018 Parliament of the World’s Religions in Toronto and the 2019 China-US-Canada Buddhist Forum in New York.
Dr. Lei Ying is Assistant Professor of Asian Languages and Civilizations at Amherst College. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University as a Presidential Scholar. Her research focuses on the interdisciplinary study of religion and literature, particularly the interconnection between Buddhism and modern Chinese literary and intellectual history. Her current book project is entitled Our Shared Karma: Buddhism, Literature, and the Modern Chinese Revolution.
Stories, Animals, and the Climate Crisis
Professor Heller opened with two brief stories. In the first, a dharma master encounters a weeping ox being beaten on its way to market, and through meditation realises that the animal is the reincarnation of his worldly brother; he persuades the owner to release it, and the ox spends the rest of its life at the temple absorbing Buddhist teachings. In the second, a monk’s cow explains in human speech that her milk belongs only to this monk, in repayment of a debt incurred in a past life when she, then a slave, had stolen food intended for monastics. One of these stories, Professor Heller revealed, comes from a children’s picture book published in Taiwan in 2005. The other is from a tenth-century Chinese text. The two share crucial structural elements: bovine rebirth is directly connected to behaviour in a prior human life, and the connection is discovered within a community, extending moral relationships across lifetimes. The chief difference is that the medieval cow speaks, while the picture-book ox can only moo in sorrow.
This seemingly small difference was Professor Heller’s starting point. Her book on Taiwanese Buddhist picture books, Literature for Little Bodhisattvas, had made her alert to the prevalence of talking animals in children’s literature, and she was struck, upon returning to the classical ox story, by the deliberate restraint of the choice not to have the ox speak. The reader’s access to the ox’s interiority comes only through the meditative vision of his monk-brother. Why this choice, in a text whose audience was presumably quite prepared to accept speaking animals? The question led Professor Heller to a broader inquiry: how do different kinds of Buddhist stories construct the relationship between human and non-human animals, and what resources might they offer for thinking through the ecological crises of the present?
The lecture situated this inquiry within two complementary intellectual contexts. The first was Amitav Ghosh’s analysis, in The Great Derangement, of the modern novel’s inadequacy for representing the climate crisis. Ghosh had argued that climate change produces events that are too vast, too improbable, and too accusatory to be assimilated into the customary frameworks of modern literary naturalism. What is needed, he suggested, are new forms of storytelling, and these might be found in the narrative traditions of Asia, Africa, and the Mediterranean, where non-human agency has long played a significant role. The second context was Lori Gruen’s concept of “entangled empathy,” developed in her book of the same name. Gruen argued against ethical theories that remain anthropocentric in orientation and proposed instead a mode of moral engagement that requires learning to toggle between perspectives, inhabiting the situation of another being sufficiently to understand what they require and to feel an obligation to respond. Storytelling, Gruen noted, is one of the primary means by which this capacity is cultivated.
A Typology of Buddhist Multi-species Narratives
Against this background, Professor Heller proposed a working typology of three kinds of Buddhist animal narratives, each with different implications for the development of cross-species empathy.
The first type she called stories of unidirectional concern. These are narratives in which a human being exercises compassion toward a non-human animal without any prior karmic connection between them. The paradigmatic example is the Jataka story of Prince Mahasattva, who slits his throat and throws himself from a cliff in order to feed a tigress so starved that she appears ready to eat her own cubs. The prince’s act is defined precisely by its crossing of species boundaries: he offers himself to a creature of lower spiritual status, associated with violence and predation, because he recognises her as a living being to whom he bears responsibility. Professor Heller was careful to note that the story is anthropocentric in its orientation: the tigress is the object of compassion, not its subject. But she invited the audience to look again at the Mogao Cave 428 mural depicting the scene, which includes not only the sacrifice but the prior image of the hungry tiger sitting awkwardly with her mouth open and her cubs gambolling around her. This image, she suggested, is a genuine attempt to inhabit the tiger’s perspective, to conjure what hunger looks like from within, and it gives the viewer imaginative access to an experience they could not otherwise approach.
A second example in this category, from a more recent Taiwanese picture book, tells the story of a young novice who saves a colony of drowning ants on his way home and, through this act of compassion, alters the fate the elderly monk’s clairvoyance had foreseen for him. Good deeds can literally save one’s life: this is a story about karma operating on a compressed timescale, shorter even than a lifetime. But Professor Heller drew a further parallel that gave the story contemporary resonance. The elderly monk believes the boy’s fate is fixed, yet the boy’s compassion rewrites it entirely. This narrative of fate overturned by ethical action, she suggested, offers an imaginative framework for approaching climate predictions: exceeding 1.5 degrees of warming may seem inevitable, and yet the effects of our collective actions may be more far-reaching than they appear.
The second type is stories of anxious entanglement, in which humans and animals are connected through reincarnation in ways that generate discomfort and ethical urgency. Professor Heller drew extensively here on Tang Lin’s seventh-century Record of Postmortem Retribution and Daoshi’s Grove of Pearls in the Garden of the Teachings. These texts contain a recurring motif: a man who has cheated or wronged someone is reborn as an animal in the household of the aggrieved party, and the past life is made legible through the animal’s unusual physical markings, its behaviour, or its dreamtime communication. An ox is marked with a stripe that resembles an official’s waistband, identifying it as the reincarnation of a corrupt bureaucrat. A calf is born with the characters of a debtor’s name written in white fur on its forehead. A pig communicates through the dreams of its former family, pleading to be rescued from the sacrificial altar.
What makes these stories ethically complex is their ambivalence. The families who discover that a pig or ox or sheep is a reincarnated relative do not, for the most part, welcome them home. The pig rescued at considerable trouble and expense is deposited in a field and told to run away, as the family cannot quite bring themselves to be seen in his company. The ox-brother at the monastery lives out his days in a religiously respectable but personally isolated situation. Professor Heller argued that we empathise with these animals not simply because they are animals, but because they were humans, and because their animal status is marked as a form of degradation and regret. This is precisely the limitation of the anxious entanglement model for cross-species thinking: it treats the animal body as a punishment rather than as a form of being with its own integrity and value.
Yet the model has resources that Professor Heller found worth recuperating. Drawing on Jonathan Walters’ concept of “sociokarma” and philosopher Jessica Locke’s work on Yogacara Buddhism and collective karmic intervention, she proposed that climate change can be understood as a form of collective anxious entanglement on a species level. The disruptive behaviour of orcas in the Atlantic and Mediterranean, widely reported in 2023, offered a striking contemporary illustration. Rather than understanding these encounters as attacks, as most media coverage framed them, Professor Heller proposed reading the orcas as indicators of ecosystemic distress, a collective karmic consequence of centuries of human action on the ocean environment. Our anxious entanglement with the orcas is real; the question is whether we can respond on the level of collective karmic intervention rather than the level of individual guilt.
The third and most promising type, in Professor Heller’s view, is stories of transposed perspectives, in which the reader is asked to see the world through the eyes of a non-human animal. She offered a reading of a Tzu Chi picture book, Little Yin’s Adventure Diary, which centres the viewpoint of a rove beetle, one of the less charismatic insects. In this story, the beetles have families, names, backpacks, and distinct personalities, while the human beings they encounter in the fields are depicted as anonymous, faceless, and undifferentiated. The reversal is deliberate and pointed: what if we were the ones who looked alike to another species, and the beetles were the beings with individual faces and inner lives? The story promotes non-killing not through abstract ethical argument but through a doubled act of perspective-taking in which the reader inhabits the beetle who, at the story’s end, inhabits the perspective of the human, understanding why people fear the rove beetle’s venom while imagining telling them that there is no need, that peaceful coexistence is possible.
Professor Heller concluded this section with a passage from Talia Lakshmi Kolluri’s story collection What We Fed to the Manticore, which imagines a young whale migrating through waters whose acoustic environment has been shattered by ship noise. The passage renders the whale’s sudden inability to hear anything but the grinding mechanical sound as a kind of perceptual annihilation, a collapse of the richly detailed world that sonar perception normally provides. We cannot know what it is to be a whale, but by putting ourselves alongside Kolluri’s fictional whale, we begin to develop the kind of cross-species empathetic imagination that both Ghosh and Gruen argue is necessary for responding to the Anthropocene.
Responses
Ven. De Yuan offered three stories corresponding to Professor Heller’s three narrative types, drawing on Buddhist scriptural tradition and contemporary Tzu Chi experience. She recounted the Jataka story of the Deer King, a previous incarnation of Sakyamuni Buddha, who went alone to the palace of a human king and negotiated a limit on daily hunting in order to bring peace back to the forest: a story in which the moral compass of a non-human being shames the human king into reform. She shared the true story of a Tzu Chi volunteer whose encounter with an eel that continued to bite, even after being severed from its head, prompted a recognition of karmic entanglement that led to a commitment to vegetarianism. And she described a Malaysian family whose collective merit-making on behalf of their severely ill infant, through organising the eating of a hundred thousand vegetarian meals in the baby’s name, appeared to contribute to his miraculous recovery. She concluded by connecting these narratives to Dharma Master Cheng Yen’s teaching that human beings, as the most intelligent of beings, bear a particular responsibility to protect all life, and that a plant-based diet is among the most concrete expressions of that responsibility.
Dr. Lei Ying opened with the twentieth-century Chinese intellectual Zhou Zuoren’s response to the same Jataka story of Prince Mahasattva that Professor Heller had discussed. Zhou, a humanist thinker of the May Fourth generation who had been deeply moved by Buddhist texts in his youth, both admired the story and insisted that its standard of compassion, the sacrifice of one’s own body for a tiger, lay beyond what could reasonably be expected of ordinary human beings. He kept it as a personal motto, a horizon to aspire toward, but maintained a critical distance. Dr. Lei Ying used this example to highlight what she identified as the central preoccupation of Professor Heller’s talk: the success and the limits of Buddhist narrative in motivating ethical transformation in readers across different historical contexts and moral sensibilities.
As a literary scholar, Dr. Lei Ying was particularly attentive to Professor Heller’s sustained engagement with narrative form, and she drew on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the dialogic imagination to suggest that the most powerful texts are those that resist reduction to a single lesson or intended conclusion. What a literary masterpiece teaches can be elusive, and this is not a failure but a feature: it is precisely the irreducibility of certain stories that allows them to continue generating new meaning across different times and audiences. She closed with a close reading of the novice-and-ants story, focusing on a dimension Professor Heller had not fully developed: the question of what the eminent monk does not and cannot know. The monk foresees the boy’s death but not his act of compassion; the boy saves the ants without knowing he is saving himself; we as readers, standing outside the story, grasp the full chain of karmic causality that none of the characters can see. The story dramatises, Dr. Lei Ying suggested, a shared condition of partial vision that is not only human but existential, a fundamental finitude that compels humility toward others whose inner lives and causal histories we can never fully apprehend.
Discussion
The discussion that followed ranged widely across questions of narrative form, collective karma, and the limits of empathy.
Professor Heller’s response to both discussants centred on what she called the “stickiness” of stories. Short Buddhist narratives, she observed, stay with us in a different way than novels do. Where a novel like The Story of the Stone resists easy summarisation and produces effects that are difficult to articulate, a story about a novice who saves ants, or about a cow chewing cud, can come to mind the next time one walks past a puddle or encounters an insect in difficulty. Ven. De Yuan’s modern examples had shown how this works in practice: a man recognises the reality of karmic retribution through a bitten hand; a family understands the connection between collective merit and individual fate through their child’s recovery. Having the resources of narrative in the back of one’s mind, Professor Heller argued, allows us to interpret contemporary encounters with the natural world in ways that lead to ethical response rather than passive observation.
On the question of whether Buddhist philosophy had had too little influence in Western cultures, Professor Heller drew a distinction between Buddhist philosophy as an academic discipline and Buddhist narrative as a mode of transmission. Picture books and short stories may be more effective vehicles for bringing Buddhist ideas to new audiences than philosophical treatises, particularly because they reach children at the developmental moment when young minds are just beginning to construct narratives about the world. She noted that images from childhood picture books remain with readers across decades in ways that arguments rarely do.
A question from You Zhao about whether Buddhist thought draws a categorical distinction between animals and plants prompted Professor Heller to acknowledge that plants represent what she called an edge case in Buddhist taxonomy, one that her research on trees in Chinese Buddhism would likely force her to address more directly. She noted a useful distinction between individual trees that take on specific significance and undifferentiated masses of vegetation, a distinction that also applies to the question of how we extend empathy to insects and other creatures on the margins of what usually attracts human moral attention.
Questions from the audience addressed the relationship between Buddhist storytelling typologies and embodied religious practice, including life-release rituals and pilgrimage. Professor Heller suggested that an ethnographic approach combining attention to stories circulating in online and video formats with fieldwork at sites of religious practice could be productive for anyone wishing to trace the relationship between narrative and action in contemporary Buddhism.
The discussion closed on a question that had been implicit throughout the lecture: whether Buddhism holds that human beings are superior to animals. Professor Heller acknowledged that in traditional Buddhist cosmology, rebirth in a human body does reflect relatively virtuous karmic standing. But she argued that the doctrine of reincarnation itself subverts any simple hierarchy: if one has inhabited, and may again inhabit, every variety of animal body, then the boundary between human and animal is porous by definition. The recognition of that porosity, she suggested, is not merely a metaphysical curiosity. It is the beginning of the ethical work.
Bibliography
Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.
Gruen, Lori. Entangled Empathy: An Alternative Ethic for Our Relationships with Animals. New York: Lantern Books, 2015.
Kolluri, Talia Lakshmi. What We Fed to the Manticore: Stories. Portland, OR: Tin House, 2022.
Locke, Jessica. “In It Together: Theorizing Collective Karma through Transformative Justice.” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 35, no. 4 (2021): 309–321.
Ohnuma, Reiko. Unfortunate Destiny: Animals in the Indian Buddhist Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Walters, Jonathan S. “Communal Karma and Karmic Community in Theravada Buddhist History.” In Constituting Communities: Theravada Buddhism and the Religious Cultures of South and Southeast Asia, edited by John Clifford Holt et al. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003.