Buddhism, the Buddha, and indeed a Buddhist twist on storytelling have shaped modern world literature from its very beginnings. One could in fact argue that one of the many beginnings of modern fiction in many parts of the world is Buddhist and further that Buddhism has consistently played a role in recurring renewals of how to write fiction since the onset of modernity. In this course students will explore that role by analysing key works, in English or in English translation and written between 1879 and today, which either modernize motifs drawn from premodern Buddhist texts or process contemporary material by adopting a Buddhist aesthetic or philosophical stance. That will involve not only reading modern religious fiction in its own right and within the context of its composition and reception in mind, but also confronting the works with the classical sources, both narrative or doctrinal, which they draw from. Students will explore: the beginnings of modern Buddhist fiction in Europe and Asia with Edwin Arnold's The Light of Asia (1879), Rudyard Kipling's Kim (1901), and Niṣṭhānanda Vajrācārya's Lalitavistara (1914), confronting European Orientalist aesthetics with religious reform literature in Asia, the secularization of Buddhist hagiography in Dalit and Marxist 1940-50s narrative literature by B. R. Ambedkar and D. D. Kosambi, 1920s and 1950s Germanophone and US-American counterculture Buddhist literature with Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha (1922) and Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums (1958), the emergence of post-war Japanese modernism through the processing of WWII in Michio Takeyama's The Burmese Harp (1946), the influence of Buddhism on postmodernist and experimental writing in Roger Zelazny's SF classic Lord of Light (1967), the collection Nixon under the Bodhi Tree (2004), and in George Saunders' much-acclaimed Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), right up to recent feminist and queer retellings of the life of the Buddha's wife Yashodhara in the homonymous novels in Telugu and in Canadian English by Volga (2017) and Vanessa Sasson (2021), respectively, as well as, staying with Canadian literature, in Shyam Selvadurai's latest novel Mansions of the Moon (2022). Each session will focus on one book which will be embedded in select readings drawn both from related contemporary Buddhist-inflected writing and from classical Sanskrit, Pali, Tibetan, and Newar Buddhist sources in translation. The larger question this course will ask is about the importance of religion for poetics and the role of the novel as a space in which authors and readers can experiment globally with both with religious hybridity and literary innovation.