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　　   (5) Baochang's biography is found in Further

　　　　  Biographies of Eminent Monks pp.426b～427c.

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produced during the Kamakura period. (6) Yet, a comparison of the fragments preserved in Sosho's summary and the corresponding passages in Huijiao's collection indicates that Huijiao was heavily indebted to Baochang's collection. An overwhelming majority of the monks whose biographies are found in Huijiao's collection appear to have had biographies in Baochang's collection. In cases where Baochang's biographies are preserved in Sosho's summary, Huijiao turns out to have reproduced intact the biographies Baochang prepared with only relatively minor editorial revisions. Even Arthur Wright noted this close relationship between Huijiao and Baochang, without, however, drawing what appears to me to be a natural conclusion: the credit for compiling the first extensive collection of the biographies of early Chinese monks should go to Baochang and not to Huijiao at all!(7)

In spite of the extensive reliance on Baochang's collection Huijiao does not mention Baochang's work in the long list of his sources in the preface/postscript. Furthermore, in one widely quoted passage Huijiao states that his was a collection of "eminent" monks rather than "famous" monks (419a24 ～ 27). "Eminence" here is self-consciously contrasted with "fame", a kind of temporary and vacuous success. Huijiao is here indirectly but obviously referring to Baochang's collection which bore the title Biographies of Famous Monks. Having determined Huijiao's close reliance on Baochang's work, I can no longer read this high-minded declaration about the nature of his collection at its face value. This passage is a covert and I would argue quite unfair dig at Baochang's work, which Huijiao had used very closely.

Both Arthur Wright and Makita Tairyo, who wrote an authoritative article on Huijiao's collection in Japanese, based their discussions of Huijiao's biographical collection on Huijiao's preface and on the biography of Huijiao that is found in Daoxuan's Further Biographies of Eminent Monks. In Wright's and Makita's discussions Huijiao is seen as a great historian who adapted the well established conventions of Chinese historiography to the task at hand and produced a remarkable history of Chinese Buddhism written as a biographical collection. To

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　　   (6) "Meisodensho", Xu zangjing vol. 134,

　　　　  pp. 1～17B.

　　   (7) "Biography and Hagiography", pp.408～412.

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illustrate this, both Wright and Makita devote considerable attention to the ten categories that Huijiao used in classifying his biographies. As I began to see Huijiao's preface as a rather tendencious document that covers up its author's overwhelming indebtedness to Baochang's existing collection, I have also become aware of the possibility that authors such as Wright and Makita may have been unfortunately misled by their uncritical reliance on Huijiao's preface.

In my opinon not only did modern authors such as Wright bring unwarranted assumptions to their reading of Huijiao's collection; they also missed the fact that significant gaps appear to exist between Huijiao's self-presentation and his comments on the nature of his work on the one hand and the actual contents of the work itself, on the other hand. As in the case of the study of Huijiao's attitude toward miracles, we need to put aside a framework imposed on the collection, this time one imposed on it by Huijiao himself, and turn to its contents directly. A careful reexamination of the contents of the collection in fact produces a very different understanding of the nature of this collection.

I became aware, for example, that the framework of a collection called Biographies of Eminent Monks that divides the "biographies" into ten categories has the ultimate effect of homogenizing what are extremely diverse stories told about very different types of monks that are included in the collection, merely by grouping certain accounts together and them juxtaposing them with the other groups. Biographies of well-known monks which were based on stupa or tomb inscriptions dominate certain categories, while in other categories the biographies seem to consist largely of miracle stories, often about relatively obscure monks, about whom little else might have been known. But these miracle story biographies, forming as they sometimes appear to do the substance of some of the independent categories of biographies, were then given the same status as the biographies in the other categories that were actually very different in nature. Miracle stories have become a species of Biographies of Eminent Monks, and in this way we are asked to read them not just as familiar miracle stories: we are asked to read them as biographies that are virtually indistinguishable from other biographies that have very different origins and characteristics.