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Avadāna (Sanskrit; Pali: Apadāna) is the name given to a type of Buddhist literature correlating past lives' virtuous deeds to subsequent lives' events.

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Avadāna (Sanskrit; Pali: Apadāna) is the name given to a type of Buddhist literature correlating past lives' virtuous deeds to subsequent lives' events.

Richard Salomon described them as "stories, usually narrated by the Buddha, that illustrate the workings of karma by revealing the acts of a particular individual in a previous life and the results of those actions in his or her present life."

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Avadana” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.