In some accounts, as the famed monk Xuanzang (602–664) left on his pilgrimage to India, he stroked a pine and told it to point east when he was on his homeward journey. After many years of growing westward, the tree’s branches turned to the east, signaling to the monastery’s monks that the great pilgrim would soon return. Something, it would seem, connected the monk and the pine. What might this and other stories tell us about trees and plant-human relationships? In other medieval tales trees are inhabited by strange creatures, bleed or weep, take revenge, express lost love, or speak to people in dreams. Such narratives allow us to chart arboreal potentialities in medieval China. But we also tell our own stories about trees and plants, and in this talk I will put these medieval accounts of responsive trees in conversation with more recent work on plant sentience from Emanuele Coccia, Suzanne Simard, and others to ask how different types of narratives (literary, scientific, philosophical) might help us to think about the connections between plants and ourselves.

Natasha Heller is a cultural historian of Chinese Buddhism with research interests spanning the premodern period (primarily 10th through 14th c.) and the contemporary era. Illusory Abiding: The Cultural Construction of the Chan Monk Zhongfeng Mingben, her first book, is a study of an eminent monk of the Yuan dynasty using poetry, calligraphy, and gong’an commentary to explore the social and cultural dimensions of Chan Buddhism. Her second monograph, titled Literature for Little Bodhisattvas: Making Buddhist Families in Modern Taiwan was published in the Contemporary Buddhism series at the University of Hawai‘i Press in 2025, and is now out in paperback. She is now working on two books: a cultural and religious history of Alishan, Taiwan and a
history of trees in Chinese Buddhism.