The categories in fact help to construct a notion of what it means to be an eminent monk ? Yet, the ten categories used to classify diverse biographies
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sometimes appear to have been imposed on the biographies artificially; sometimes the choice of the category for a given biography does not seem to be unambiguously dictated either by the contents of the biographies or the self-understanding of their subjects. Nevertheless, the category justifies and explains the choice of the monk as an example of an eminent monk and the inclusion of his biography into the collection.

Existing scholarship on Huijiao's collection that focuses on his preface and the organization of the collection tends to underestimate the diversity of the actual contents of the collection and just how artificial the categories are. A different strategy that emphasizes the contents of the collection as a whole inevitably leads us to a very different understanding of the nature of Huijiao's collection, and in fact that of the entire tradition of the Biographies of Eminent Monks collections in medieval China. What we find in these collections is not so much a set of standardized biographies but rather a massive and diverse collection of historical facts and stories about monks. Read in its entirety the collection does not readily form a coherent whole; the framework that Huijiao imposed on it only gives it an appearance of such coherence.

The study of the Biographies of Eminent Monks has so far been carried on for the most part by positivistically minded historians. These scholars have used the work as their principal source for constructing a modern critical history of early Chinese Buddhism and have therefore tended to dismiss passages describing miracles and other legendary stories simply as unreliable sources for their historical reconstructions. Yet, miracles and legendary stories played important roles in early Chinese Buddhism. As such they are themselves an important part of this "historical" reality. As our understanding of the contents of the Biographies of Eminent Monks changes and we no longer regard the collection as a harmonious and systematic collection of biographies but see it instead as a diverse collection of stories about monks, we will also have to readjust our view about the nature of the kind of "history" that we are attempting to write. It is here that I wish to suggest that Peter Brown's theoretical reflections scattered throughout his stimulating writings about Late Antiquity may be particularly helpful to us.
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2.The Holy Man in medieval Chinese Buddhism

Though this may not be palatable to some of my colleagues in religious studies, I would like to begin my discussion here by pointing out that in discussing Brown's views in a broader comparative context it world be a mistake to focus on "holy men" as a religious type.(8) It would be a mistake to begin our discussion by looking for "holy men" in Chinese Buddhism. Instead I propose that we focus our attention on the way Brown formulates his questions as he approaches the topic of "holy men." (9)

Brown talks about the "idea of the holy" (175), "the loci of the holy" (176), and the "function" of the holy men. I found the following paragraph particularly intriguing:

Unlike paganism and much of Judaism, the Christian communities were prepared to invest individual human beings with supernatural powers or with the ability to exercise power on behalf of the supernatural. It was as precisely indentifiable bearers of the holy, and as the heirs of an imagined genealogy of similar bearers of the holy ─ apostles, martyrs,

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　　   (8) As an example of a study that compares Byzantine and

　　　　  Medieval Chinese Buddhist "holy men", see Samuel

　　　　  N. C. Lieu, "The Holy Man and their Biographers in

　　　　  Early Byzantium and Medieval China", Maistor:

　　　　  Classical Byzantine and Reneissance Studies

　　　　  for Robert Browning, edited  by Ann  Moffat

　　　　  (Canberra, 1984), 113～147. The original version

　　　　  of my paper was  prepared as a response to Prof.

　　　　  Lieu's paper at  a Departmental Colloquium  that

　　　　  was  held  at McMaster  University  in  January.

　　   (9) I found the articles in Society and the Holy in

　　　　  Late Anciquity most helpful  in acquainting