Dialogic Elements of Buddhist Mythology explores the dynamic processes through which Buddhist narrative traditions engaged with, reinterpreted, and transformed the myths, figures, and stories of other Indian religious traditions. Rather than viewing Buddhist mythology as an isolated body of narratives, Michael D. Nichols presents it as fundamentally dialogic: shaped through continuous encounters with competing traditions, shared cultural materials, and rival understandings of religious authority.Drawing on theories of influence, transvaluation, and heteroglossia, the book examines how Buddhist authors and communities appropriated familiar mythic figures and narrative structures and redeployed them to convey distinctively Buddhist ideas. The figure of Māra provides a foundational example of this process, revealing how inherited religious imagery could be transformed in order to articulate Buddhist teachings and identities.The study then ranges across a series of significant cases. It considers Buddhist reimaginings of Hindu divinities, including Indra, Yama, and Viṣṇu; examines the relationship between Buddhist Jātaka traditions and the great Sanskrit epics, the Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa; and traces the ways familiar narratives were adapted to new doctrinal and religious purposes. The book also turns the idea of mythic dialogue inward, exploring how different Buddhist traditions reinterpreted shared figures such as Devadatta and developed contrasting uses of parable, metaphor, and narrative.Bringing together examples often studied separately, Dialogic Elements of Buddhist Mythology offers a unified framework for understanding mythology as a crucial arena of religious interaction in South Asian Buddhism. It shows how narrative adaptation enabled Buddhist traditions not only to engage with the religious worlds around them, but also to define themselves, distinguish competing positions, and continually reshape the meanings of inherited stories.
Michael D. Nichols
Michael D. Nichols is Professor of Religious Studies at Martin University. He received his PhD in Religious Studies from Northwestern University. His research focuses on the religious traditions of South Asia, particularly Buddhism and Hinduism, with special interests in mythology, narrative, Buddhist-Hindu interactions, and the historical transformation of religious symbols. He is the author of Malleable Māra: Transformations of a Buddhist Symbol of Evil; Religion and Myth in the Marvel Cinematic Universe; and numerous studies on Buddhist mythology, Indian religious literature, and the figure of Māra in South Asian and comparative contexts.
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