Traditional Buddhist story-telling or pien-wen has been viewed as the earliest phase of a popular oral tradition which later flowered ‘into drama, the vernacular short story and the novel. But Pien-wen texts may be transitional, marking a stage between oral and written texts, if thestoryteller was not “reciting” a text (as fixed form) but improvising on a remembered (not memorized) piece of fiction; in this case the pien (“transformation”) would mean “performance” and pien-wen the “recording” of that performance. Here I attempt to show that the orally transmitted performance in four pienwen stories is the result of a dialogue between the story-teller and his culture-, history- and situation-specific audience, and thus that these stories studied carefully together can reveal an alternative reality to that represented in/by the existing literary canon.

oral, recitation, literary, performance, text, recording, pien-wen, dialogue, transitional, canon