Every story, gathered by subject.
A leishu (類書) is a topical compendium: instead of following one text from beginning to end, Chinese Buddhist editors reached across the entire canon — sūtras, vinaya, and beyond — and pulled out every narrative passage on a given subject, then arranged those passages under headings so a reader could find, say, everything the canon says about hell, or about generous kings, in one place.
These are anthologies of story and precedent, not systematic argument — closer in spirit to a curated collection of parables than to a treatise. Distinct from the Abhidharma's analytical dissection and from a sūtra's own narrative arc, but drawing its material from exactly the same canon.
What "leishu" means
Leishu (類書) — literally "classified writings" — is a genre native to Chinese letters generally, not unique to Buddhism: an editor combs a large body of literature and re-sorts its contents by topic rather than by source. Buddhist leishu apply the same method to the canon, so a reader can study "kings," "hells," or "the sun and moon" as a single thread running through dozens of separate sūtras and vinaya texts.
Because the material is narrative — stories, causal accounts (因緣), and parables — rather than doctrinal argument, reading a leishu feels closer to an anthology of tales than to a philosophical treatise, even though every story is drawn, and cited, from a canonical source.
Not sūtra, not śāstra — a reader's tool
A leishu is neither buddhavacana (the Buddha's own recorded word) nor a master's original composition — it claims no authorship over its content, only over its arrangement. Every passage is a citation, usually closing with the exact source text it was drawn from, in the tradition's own citation style.
That makes this section's translation work different in kind from the Abhidharma: less about rendering tight technical argument with total precision, more about carrying across the narrative voice of dozens of underlying sūtras and vinaya texts, story by story, while still naming sources and preserving technical terms exactly.
Choose a collection to enter.
We are building this section one leishu at a time, starting with the largest and most celebrated Buddhist topical compendium to survive in Chinese.