The hermit poet Kamo-no Chō mei compiled a collection of tales about the awakening of the heart (Hosshinshū, c. 1216), continuing and updating the tradition of setsuwa collections of didactic tales. The peculiarities of the collection can be explained on the basis of the changes in the life of the Japanese Buddhist community that took place at the turn of the 12 th and 13 th centuries. The main characters of the tales are hermits, “escapees from the world,” and different aspects of their lives are discussed in the thematic sections of the collection. In addition to the tales, the book contains discussions of difficult questions of Buddhist preaching: how to treat death and love, one’s own body, the poetic word, and what a person can rely on if he or she wants to try to follow the Buddha’s path in the “evil age”. In addition to the Lotus Sutra, which gave the book its title and one of its narrative forms, the sources of the Hosshinshū include the sutras about the Pure Land and Genshin’s Ōjō y ō shū, as well as several other sutras and treatises that were common property of various schools in Japan. Chō mei includes both good and bad examples from the life of the Japanese Buddhist community in his book, with only occasional reference to India and China, and confines himself mainly to events recent and contemporary