───────────

　　   (3) Peter Brown, Society and the Holy in Later Antiquity

　　　　  (Berkeley, Los  Angeles, Oxford, 1982), particularly

　　　　  in pp. 8 ～ 13.

P 481
exegetes; the section of miracle workers is placed immediately after this section, preceding the sections on meditation masters and vinaya specialists. In the two later biographies of eminent monks collections modeled after Huijiao's collection, the title given to the miracle workers section is modified and becomes "cosmic response" (gantong), a term that harmonized better with contemporary Chinese Buddhist scholasticism. In these later collections the section was also placed in a lower position: the section of translators was followed by one on exegetes, meditation masters, vinaya specialists, and defenders of the teaching, and only then by the section on miracle workers. I am inclined to interpret these changes as indications that later compilers of Biographies of Eminent Monks felt that Huijiao had actually placed excessive and undue emphasis on miracle workers. This is actually a somewhat surprising situation, since Daoxuan, who introduced these changes, was himself keenly interested in miracle stories and compiled a comprehensive collection of miracle stories toward the end of his life.

b) In these collections each of the ten sections concludes with comments by the compiler about the nature of the categories of monks whose biographies make up these sections "Lun yue......" Huijiao's comments on "miracle workers" culminate in a defense of the extraordinary feats described in the biographies of the monks he included in this section (395ab).

c) In his preface (or postscript, in the form in which the collection is reproduced in the Taisho collection) Huijiao lists a number of sources that he consulted in compiling the collection. This list includes several works that were obviously collections of miracle stories. The majority of these works consulted by Huijiao are now lost, but many fragments, particularly of miracle story collections, have been preserved in a medieval Buddhist encyclopedia, the Fa yuan zhulin or The Jade Forest in the Garden of Buddhist Teachings. In an earlier study I collected these fragments and compared them with the corresponding passages in Huijiao's biographies. The result was striking.(4) Huijiao often edited and rephrased the passages describing miracles, but he also carefully

　　   ───────────

　　   (4) "Two Sources of Chinese Buddhist  Biographies: Stupa

　　　　  Inscriptions  and Miracle  Stories", Monks and

　　　　  Magicians Religious Biographies in Asia

　　　　  (Oakville, Ontario, 1988 ), pp. 119 ～ 228.

P 482
preserved the details of the miracle stories he used. In some cases miracle stories about famous monks that were found in independent miracle story collections were inserted into larger biographies that he copied from other sources that were less interested in miracle stories. This practice might confirm Wright's view that Huijiao was a good historian who collected information from a wide range of sources and paid attention to details of the accounts in the source he used. But it also indicates that Huijiao collected miracle stories diligently and used them liberally in compiling his Biographies of Eminent Monks.

My observations on Huijiao's use of earlier miracle story collections has lead me to conclude that Huijiao was in fact deeply interested in miracle stories. I believe furthermore that, contrary to Wright's general assumption, members of the literati group in medieval China were also themselves quite interested in miracle stories. A rich tradition of miracle story collections existed by the time Huijiao produced his biography collection; indeed, interest in these stories was so great that a number of compilations of miracle stories were in circulation when Huijiao went to compile his collection of biographies.

Beyond just proposing that Wright's understanding of Huijiao's attitude towards miracles needs to be questioned, I should also like to raise the issue of Huijiao as the model historian. I have become increasingly sceptical about the commonly held view that Huijiao was a great historian. One important work that Huijiao used in compiling his collection is something called Biographies of Famous Monks compiled by Baochang during the period 510 to 513. (5) This was a large collection consisting of 30 fascicles. Baochang was a disciple of Sengyou (445 ～ 518), arguably the most important figure in early Chinese Buddhist historiography, who compiled several collections of historical documents. Since Huijiao appears to have completed his collection around 530 or 531, he must have been at work on his collection of monks' biographies at a time when the large collection compiled by Baochang already existed. Baochang's collection has disappeared, probably due to the popularity of Huijiao's later collection; and only parts of Baochang's collection are now known through a summary that a Japanese monk Sosho