Featured on PDR in the collection Reciting Pictures: Buddhist Texts for the Illiterate

In the introduction to Elaborations on Emptiness (1996), Donald S. Lopez, Jr. recounts a Japanese story called “Miminashi Hōichi”, about a blind biwa minstrel who can recite the epic thirteenth-century Tale of Heike by heart (a chronicle that exceeds eight hundred pages in its English translation). One day, the young man is approached by the servant of a lord, who asks to hear the concluding episode performed, wherein the last samurai of the Heike bloodline is executed — a segment alone that requires seven nights of recitation. His first six installments are a great success. But before the final session, it is discovered that the blind singer was tricked: he has not been visiting a noble temple in the evenings, as he thought, but an…