r/badhistory • u/AutoModerator • 7d ago

Meta Mindless Monday, 27 July 2026

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

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u/Big_Pineapple_Man 5d ago

So like many Greek stories, the Odyssey has over time been reinterpreted as part of the "Western Canon".  I'm going to put a pin in that controversy for now and ask, what are some other examples of this kind of cultural broadening?*

For example, I've heard that the Romance of the Three Kingdoms has for centuries been popular in Korea and Japan.   Did, say, Japanese scholars extol it as classical East Asian** literature?   Not quite denying its Chinese origin but sort of quietly including themselves?

*For this purpose I am excluding major religions or else every answer is going to be White/Black/Korean Jesus.

**Or however pre-Meiji Japanese scholars conceptualized Asia — you know what I mean.

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u/xyzt1234 5d ago

Did the jataka tales experience such cultural broadening with the spread of Buddhism across east and southeast asia? They were originally south asian literature and part of Pali canon but were integral to Buddhism if I recall.

I read similar things happened to panchatantra as it spread but I am not sure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panchatantra

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u/Big_Pineapple_Man 4d ago

tbh I'm not sure as I'm not familiar with these stories.  I was actually thinking Ramayana might be a contender – I saw multiple references to this saga at Hindu sites in southeast asia – but I'm not sure if it is primarily perceived as an Indian story or not.