ABSTRACT
My inquiry concerns something which appears to lie on the margins of Japanese and Buddhist literature, namely a tale about the thunder child Dōjō hōshi found in the Nihon ry ō iki, the earliest collection of Buddhist legends in Japan composed at the beginning of the ninth century. Containing a mélange of Buddhist and folkloric elements, this story is a distinctive Buddhist product and as such provides a lens for viewing the initial encounter of Buddhism with Japanese local culture.
