In Asia misers were the butt of humorous folklore. One very early cautionary tale is the "Illisa Jataka" from the Buddhist scriptures. This includes two stories, in the first of which a rich miser is miraculously converted to generosity by a disciple of the Buddha; following this, the Buddha tells another story of a miser whose wealth is given away when the king of the gods impersonates him, and when he tries to intervene is threatened with what will happen if he does not change his ways. Two 16th century stories concerning misers are included among the witticisms attributed to Birbal during Mughal times. In one he extracts from a casuistical miser a fee for a poem written in his praise. In the other the miser is forced to reward a merchant who rescued his hoard from a fire with the whole of it. Arabs similarly made extensive use of misers in their literature. The most famous being the 600 page collection of anecdotes called "Kitab Al Bukhala" or Book of Misers by Al-Jāḥiẓ. He lived in 800 CE during the Abbasid Caliphate in Basra, making this the earliest and largest known work on the subject in Arabic literature.