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

Jan 26, 2026

Natasha Heller, associate professor and cultural historian of Chinese Buddhism, discusses Buddhist picturebooks and family Buddhism in modern Taiwan. She explores picturebooks as a new Buddhist genre. She traces how homes and caregivers shape children as religious subjects. She highlights cute bodhisattva imagery, moral stories recast for kids, and books that make children agents in health and environmental action.

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ANECDOTE

Bookstore Break That Started The Project

Natasha Heller found the project seed at a Buddhist bookstore during a conference break in Taiwan.
The contrast between scholarly papers at the conference and children's Buddhist books sparked a larger research project.

INSIGHT

Picturebooks As A New Buddhist Genre

Picturebooks create a new child-focused genre of Buddhist writing distinct from monastic or adult lay texts.
Their repeat-read, image-text interplay shapes early religious learning in ways scripture-focused adult texts do not.

INSIGHT

Three Drivers Behind The Picturebook Boom

Three developments enabled Taiwanese Buddhist picturebooks: organized Buddhism's resources, changing family dynamics, and a robust picturebook culture.
These forces converged in the 1990s–2000s to produce a rich corpus of Buddhist picturebooks.

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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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