Pien-wen is a literary genre of stories told on religious festivals at Buddhist or Taoist temples in the Tangdynasty. The narrator would tend to structure his tales around themes from the Buddhist sutras or literature and embellish them, resulting in something between poetry and narrative prose and unwittingly creating a new form of Chinese literature in the process.
變文是唐朝佛寺或道觀在宗教節日講的故事，作者往往以既有的佛典或文學故事為架構，加枝添葉，夾詩夾散文敘述，無意中創造了中國文學的一種新形式。