Last year’s translation and online publication of The Hundred Deeds represented a significant achievement in our progress over the past decade. In commemoration of our tenth anniversary, and as an expression of the ways in which we collaborate to make the words of the Buddha as accessible as possible for future generations, we asked children around the world to help us illustrate all 127 stories in The Hundred Deeds.
This downloadable special edition publication celebrates ten years of connecting the world with wisdom, and with these illustrations we make the aspiration that the Buddhadharma continues to flourish, and thank you all for your support thus far.
This sūtra is a collection of stories known as avadāna—a narrative genre widely represented in the Sanskrit Buddhist literature and its derivatives—comprising more than 120 individual texts. It includes narratives of Buddha Śākyamuni’s notable deeds and foundational teachings, the stories of other well-known Buddhist figures, and a variety of other tales featuring people from all walks of ancient Indian life and beings from all six realms of existence. The texts sometimes include stretches of verse. In the majority of the stories the Buddha’s purpose in recounting the past lives of one or more individuals is to make definitive statements about the karmic ripening of actions across multiple lifetimes, and the sūtra is perhaps the best known of the many works in the Kangyur on this theme.