In Osamu Tezuka's manga Buddha, Assaji was eaten alive by wolves or wild dogs. I always thought the manga artist came up with a lot of his own original stories. Because this story and others are not on wikipedia. But then I recently watched an old Hong Kong TV show Journey to the West II (1998) and it depicted the same story of Assaji being eaten alive. And that of King Bimbisara being killed by his own son, as predicted by Assaji. As influential as the manga was, it seems unlikely that a Hong Kong TV show would have picked a story from a manga. Is it possible, in Japanese or Chinese Buddhism, they have their own set of canonical stories? And they are unfortunately hard to find on the English internet?

How is Buddhism structured? All I really know if you have lay people, priests, monks, and in some places masters or grand masters (I don't know if these are the same), and there are various different variants of the religion, each with their own clergy etc.. So, by analogy, Britain has the arch bishop of Canterbury , and he's the principle "head of the Church" of England. What equivalent formal positions exist in Japanese Buddhism? Google wasn't much help! All I found out was that e.g. Soto zen has two principle temples, Eihei-ji and Sōji-ji. Do they have heads? Soto's - democratic - head is the "Shūmusōchō"; where can I read about this position? Are the other subsets of Buddhism structured similarly?

- Can anyone explain how 'stimulus / response' appears in *Chinese* or *Japanese Buddhism* ? - What does it mean? I can recall barely nothing about it, but I do know that it features in Zhiyi's work, *Chin Fa-hua-hsüan-i * at least. I'm especially interested in how the terms, which I believe are paired, may have a universal meaning.

In the Chinese Wikipedia article on sky burial , there's a section saying that sky burial is illegal in Japan: > 棄屍嫌疑 > > 在某些地方，天葬的行為，可能觸犯遺棄屍體的罪行。 > > 日本 > > 刑法第190條（死体損壊罪） Google translation: > Dumped suspect [My assumption for translation: Illegality of > abandoning bodies] > > In some places, burial behavior may violate abandoned corpses offense. > > Japan > > Penal Code section 190 (dead body damage Huai crime) Did Japanese Buddhists once use sky burial for their dead? Or is the ban just a broader ban that just happens to include sky burial?

The English language edition's article on the original kamikaze (divine wind) against the Mongol empire (not WWII) refers to Buddhism, though it also mentions Japanese "gods". > ...1274 and again in 1281. Due to growth of Zen Buddhism among Samurai at the time, these were the first events where the typhoons were described as "divine wind" as much by their timing as by their force. This surprised me a little - I thought the "kami" in kamikaze referred to beings from Japan's native shinto belief system, which many Japanese have alongside Buddhism. Was kamikaze typically regarded as a supernatural event in Buddhism?

Often the Zen books I've read such as Zen Mind Beginners Mind are illustrated by calligraphy oftentimes by the author themselves. Also Zen figures such as the hermit and poet Ryokan are also known for their calligraphy. Is there a particular link between Zen and calligraphy? Are the two practice's mutually supportive in some way or is the link purely a matter of both Zen and calligraphy being important in Japanese culture - the link been purely coincidental?