Natasha Heller, "Literature for Little Bodhisattvas: Making Buddhist Families in Modern Taiwan" (U Hawai'i Press, 2025)

Jan 26, 2026

Natasha Heller, associate professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia who studies Chinese Buddhism, discusses Buddhist picturebooks and family Buddhism in modern Taiwan. She examines picturebooks as a new Buddhist genre. She explores how families and publishers shape child-focused religious education. She describes cute portrayals of buddhas, storytelling strategies, and home-based learning.

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ANECDOTE

Book Project Born In A Bookstore

Natasha Heller discovered Buddhist children's books browsing a Dharma Drum bookstore during a conference break.
That surprise encounter became the seed that expanded into a book-length project on Buddhist picturebooks in Taiwan.

INSIGHT

Three Forces Behind Buddhist Picturebooks

Three converging developments made Buddhist picturebooks possible: institutional Buddhism's resources, changing family structures, and a robust Taiwanese picturebook culture.
Those forces produced child-focused Buddhist texts combining image and text for repeat, shared reading.

INSIGHT

Storytelling As Sutra Commentary

Xinyun adapts the philosophically dense Heart Sutra for children by surrounding it with stories and visual metaphors.
Illustrations (e.g., waves) and fables (Aesop's dog) function as commentary to scaffold later encounters with the sutra.

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In Literature for Little Bodhisattvas: Making Buddhist Families in Modern Taiwan (U Hawai'i Press, 2025), Natasha Heller makes two key interventions: first, she argues that picturebooks are a new genre of Buddhist writing, and second, she calls attention to an emergent family Buddhism in Taiwan that fashions children as religious subjects through shared attention with adult readers.

Surveying Taiwanese Buddhism from the ground up, Heller explores the changing family dynamics that have made children into a crucial audience for Buddhist education and the home a key site for Buddhist cultivation. By taking picturebooks seriously as part of the Buddhist textual tradition, Heller demonstrates their engagement with canonical sources alongside innovations formodern audiences. Close readings analyzing both text and image trace narrative themes aboutBuddhist figures, and connect representations of buddhas and bodhisattvas to a visual culturewhere new values such as cuteness are articulated. Heller shows that picturebooks have becomean integral part of a contemporary Buddhist education that equips children with strategies tointerpret everyday life in Buddhist ways and provides religious models for action in the modern world.

Literature for Little Bodhisattvas is a pathbreaking work revealing how contemporary picturebooks reframe Buddhism and offer fresh perspectives on its teachings and ideals of family for both children and adults.

Natasha Heller is associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. She is a cultural historian of Chinese Buddhism with research interests spanning the premodern period (primarily 10th through 14th c.) and the contemporary era. Illusory Abiding: The Cultural Construction of the Chan Monk Zhongfeng Mingben, her first book, is a study of an eminent monk of the Yuan dynasty using poetry, calligraphy, and gong’an commentary to explore the social and cultural dimensions of Chan Buddhism.

Li-Ping Chen is a visiting scholar in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts.

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