This book will open up a new window into early medieval religion by focusing on a special genre of textsBuddhist miracle tales--little studied in Western academia. The text in question is the Mingxiang ji, written by a 5th century literates.

In early medieval China hundreds of Buddhist miracle texts were circulated, inaugurating a trend that would continue for centuries. Robert Ford Campany, one of North America's preeminent scholars of Chinese religion, presents in this volume the first complete, annotated translation, with in-depth commentary, of the largest extant collection of miracle tales from the early medieval period, Wang Yan's Records of Signs from the Unseen Realm, compiled around 490 C.E.