Legendary Life Story

Bhutan has inherited a rich heritage of legendary life stories about figures and events in the past from the Buddhist corpuses of Jataka and Avadana literature. This genre of literature deal with life stories such as the previous rebirths of the Buddha, the life of the Bodhisattva beings and great masters in the past. The stories, which are purported to be historical accounts, contains a great deal of legendary and mythical elements and also have a moral or spiritual message. The kyerab sub-genre of this type of literature focus on the accounts of rebirth while the togjoed sub-genre deals with the achievements and realisation of the subject, as the terms suggest.