Ethiopian tradition places Yared in sixth century Aksum, in the generations when the kingdom's Christianity was deepening its own forms, and tells his life as a parable of grace. The boy Yared, sent to church school, failed at his letters until, resting under a tree, he watched a caterpillar fall and climb, fall and climb, until it reached the leaves, and returned to his studies transformed. The turning of his gift came as vision: three birds from paradise, tradition says, carried him to the heavenly liturgy, and he returned bearing the three modes of Ethiopian chant, ge'ez, ezel and araray, which the tradition has assigned ever since to ordinary days, to fasts and funerals, and to great feasts.
The most loved story sets him before King Gebre Meskel. Singing with his whole body in the trance of the chant, Yared did not feel the king's spear, slipped from the royal hand, pierce his foot, and the king, seeing blood at last, offered any recompense; Yared asked leave to withdraw, and ended his days a hermit in the Semien mountains. The hagiography is late and the sixth century record thin, so historians treat the biography as tradition rather than document; but the tradition itself is unanimous, and in the Tewahedo church Yared is not a legend among others but the named fountainhead of its entire musical culture, commemorated in the Synaxarium and painted with his birds in churches across Ethiopia.