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Tales of Times Now Past (Konjaku monogatari-shū, 1120s) is the most extensive Japanese didactic tales (setsuwa) compilation, a significant source for explo­ration of medieval Japanese culture. This tales collection consists of more than one thousand stories, in which action takes place in India, China and Japan. The text had been created by highly educated authors mostly for unsophisticated readers, and in the same time it is positioned on the intersection of different reli­gious and literary traditions. In this paper the way how heritage of those tradi­tions is transformed in setsuwa is considered on the example of conception of wisdom. In Konjaku monogatari-shū this conception is multicomponent, has much in common with one in the Chinese classical philosophy and determined by Buddhist world outlook, which was intrinsic for the investigated tale collection. Great variety of characters from all social groups can be described in the Tales like people, who possess the wisdom in one its aspect or another: there are not only famous sages such as Confucius and Zhuang Zhou, prominent Buddhist saints or even Gautama Buddha himself, not only sovereigns and high officials, but also common laity, men and women, children and elderly people. There is a great similarity between concept of "wisdom" in this text and the one of mod­ern Japanese people.

The tradition of "biographies of eminent monks", kōsōden, was adopted by Japa­nese Buddhist masters from China and developed in various works, including collections of setsuwa tales. There are three components in monastic biogra­phies: the path of the Buddha, retraced by his follower; the role of the monk in the history of the country; ascetic experience, which allows to assign the monk to one of the categories within the community (exegete of the Buddha teaching, miracle worker, merciful helper to the suffering living beings etс.). The genre of biographies partly overlaps with other genres: tales about miracles and about posthumous retribution; the same story, depending on the context, may shift toward one of these genres. "Genkō Era Buddhist History" ("Genkō Shakusho", 1322) contains about 400 biographies of monks, which are divided in several categories. What categories turned out to be the most extensive in this text – in particular, the biographies of miracle workers – allows us to make some assumptions about the sources the compiler used or at least took into account. One of these sources was "Anthology of Tales from the Past" ("Konjaku mono­gatari-shū", 1120s). This collection of setsuwa tales showcases the structure of biographies as they differ from texts of related genres based on several series of examples. In turn, a number of stories included in this collection trace back to "Miraculous Tales of the Lotus Sutra" ("Hokke Genki", 1040s). A comparison of the two texts shows how, with a change in context, the tale about a miracle can become the tale about of a person who experienced a miracle, that is, acquire the features of a life story.