Books about saints have an enduring appeal. In many ways, saints are heroes in the commonly understood sense. Most went on adventures or faced some kind of adversity, and therefore people looked to them in admiration and for inspiration. Saints could be ordinary people who worked hard to achieve standards few others could reach, and people looked up to them for that. Sometimes they were more otherworldly: outsiders, or the unimaginably rich, or the unimaginably poor. Stories about saints capture the imagination and many have become a staple part of modern culture— St. Patrick ridding Ireland of snakes, St. George fighting the dragon. Saints’ stories even form part of the long- standing Penguin Classics series, making them from one perspective part of the modern literary canon of world culture. The stories tell of saintly and heroic ideals, but these are always shaped by the ways in which the stories are told, the way the author and audience relate to each other, and expectations about what a good hero/ saint should do. Indeed, the hero/ saint themselves, even a reluctant one, usually knows what is expected of them in these stories and is able to take on specific predetermined roles as necessary. The boundaries between stories and real life are not especially strong in that sense, because it is natural for people to interpret their experiences as stories or parts of stories.

The saint as exemplar, the saint as embodiment of story, is a fascinatingly ubiquitous phenomenon— a fact that should open up rich worlds for understanding hagiography that go beyond the familiar Western canon. Buddhism in India had a variety of figures portrayed for emulation or devotion, including the Buddha, the pratyekabuddha, the arhant, and the bodhisattva. The tradition of venerating holy men was strong in Buddhist Tibet, too, where Padmasambhava, the eighth- century founder of the monastery of Samye, was popular; and a significant tradition of Nathar developed, revealing enlightenment through example. Biographies about holy men can be found in Japan, such as the various stories that circulated about the Buddhist priest Gyōki (d. 749).