1.Huijiao's Biographies of Eminent Monks

In this paper I should like to propose a new direction for examining the standard Chinese Buddhist biographical collections, based on my reading of Peter Brown ' s various writings on "holy men" in Late Antiquity. I should like to suggest that a reading of Peter Brown's work can offer a number of fruitful insights that might well be applied to the study of Chinese Buddhist biographies, and beyond the biographies to a study of the function of the monk in Chinese society. To begin with I offer some brief critical reflections on current scholarship on these biographies.

Arthur Wright's well-known article on Huijiao's Biograph ies of Eminent Monks originally published in 1954 , is still frequently cited today as the standard reference work on this collection of the biographies of early Chinese Buddhist monks. (1) This influential article, however, reflects very clearly its author's pointed understanding of both Chinese civilization and the nature and position of Buddhism within that civilization. For this reason any discussion of its contribution must first consider some of its basic underlying assumptions. (2) As I began to work on medieval Chinese Buddhist biographies, I noticed certain basic, and I believe problematic, assumptions in Wright's study, and consequently became sceptical about Wright's account of Huijiao's collection.

The following statement is typical of Wright's discussion:

He (Huijiao) was less concerned to awe the simple with accounts of miracles than to persuade the nobles and the literati that Buddhism was intellectually respectable and that its clergy had led useful, creative, and well disciplined lives. (386.)

　　   ───────────

　　   (1) "Biography and Hagiography: Hui-chiao's Lives of

　　　　  Eminent Monks", Silver Jubilee volume  of teh

　　　　  Jimb un Kagaku Kenkyusyo, Kyoto University,

　　　　  Kyoto, 1954, pp. 383 ～ 432.

　　   (2) Some of these limitations are shared in the more

　　　　  recent  and more  sophisticated  study by Makita

　　　　  Tairyo,   Kosoden   no  seiritsujo,   and

　　　　  Kosoden no seiritsuge  in Tohogakuho (Kyoto),

　　　　  44(1973), pp.101～125 and 48 (1975), pp. 229 ～ 259.

P 480

In this statement, Wright imports into the study of medieval Chinese Buddhism the kind of "two-tier model" that Peter Brown has criticized extensively.(3) Huijiao's treatment of miracles is then explained in terms of that basic model. Miracle stories "awe the simple", but are not "intellectually respectable" for "the nobles and the literati".

In the context in which he makes the above statement Wright asserts that Huijiao, "who was steeped in Chinese historiographical tradition", was trying to write "a work within that tradition, one that would meet the prevailing standards for secular literary and historical writing." Wright "ventures to suggest" that Huijiao's adoption of the conventions of secular historical writing "was motivated by a desire ─ conscious or unconscious ─ to rescue Buddhist biography from the limbo of the exotic, the bizarre, and give to the lives of the monks a place of honour in the cultural history of China. In short, one of his motives......was to advance the naturalization of monks and monasticism in Chinese history and society. "(385). Wright goes on to contrast Huijiao's biographies with "hagiographies"of the great figures of the Indian tradition and what he calls the "popular Chinese literary genre......whose highly colored stories were intended to entertain, with "morals" thrown in for those with a taste for them" (386).

I would like to argue that we need to dispense with the broad interpretive framework that Wright is using, namely that there is a religion of the masses that is opposed to a religion of the elite, and that we must question Wright's characterization of that elite culture as disdainful of tales of miracles and the supernatural. At the same time we must turn to a careful and detailed consideration of the actual contents of Huijiao's biography collection. In fact from a careful reading of the collection and related texts a remarkably different picture of Huijiao's view of miracles and miracle workers begins to emerge, as the following comments make clear.

a) In his tenfold classification of biographies Huijiao placed the category of "miracle workers" (or "wonder workers"?, shenyi) in the third position: the opening section on translators is followed by the large and central section on