myself with the theoretical  insights  of his large

　　　　  and learned  body of work.  The passages  from Peter

　　　　  Brown quoted  below have been  taken  from this work.

　　　　  See also The Cult  of the Saints Its Rise and

　　　　  Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago,  1981)

　　　　  and　　 The Making   of  Late  Antiquity

　　　　  (Cambridge, Mass., 1978).  For a lengthy review of

　　　　  the  The Cult of the Saints  see   Jaques

　　　　  Fontaine, "Le culte des  saints et ses implications

　　　　  sociologique:  reflections sur un recent essai de

　　　　  Peter Brown", Analecta Bollandiana 100 (1982),

　　　　  pp. 17 ～ 41.

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prophets ─ that the Christian leaders were able to form the Christian communities. The groups that took up a stance to the society and culture of their times were formed around known and revered loci of the holy......and these loci tended to be human beings. As the rabbis told Justin martyr: "but as for you, who have forsaken God and put your trust in a man, what salvation can await you?" (176)

Brown then continues to compare the developments in Western and Eastern Christendom in terms of different attitudes toward the holy: "In the West the precise locus of the supernatural power associated with the holy was fixed with increasing precision" (178); "At the same time, the eastern Church had entered on to what came to strike early medieval western observers as a baffling 'crisis of overproduction' of the holy. More men were accepted as bearers or agents of the supernatural on earth, and in a far greater variety of situations." (179). "The rise and function of the holy man in the sixth-century eastern Meditarranean as revealed in the work of John of Ephesus stands in marked contrast to the world of religious experiences ─ mainly crystallized around relics ─ revealed in the works of John's contemporary, Gregory of Tours."(182).

Furthermore, describing the eastern Meditarranean world, " The holy escaped social definition ─ or, rather, its absence of social definition became intelligible ─ because it was thought of principally as a power that "manifested" itself in a manner that was as vivid as it was discontinuous with normal human expectations."(182) "Sanctity, for East Romans, always bordered on the paradoxical. For what we have are men with "reputation of power"; yet this power was thought to have been drawn from outside any apparent nick in the power-structure of society. "(183 ～ 184). In contrast, "The holy, in the West, could be defined as it was in the east, in terms of a stark discontinuity between the human and the non-human...... And yet this discontinuous holy is deeply inserted into human society. In the most poker-faced and unparadoxical manner it makes clear who has received grace in its sight and who has not......I would risk the suggestion that these phenomena reveal a mentality where the holy plays a more permanent role in law and in politics than it would ever play in East Rome."(192). "Byzantine society could take the strain of life on its own, frankly
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secular, terms. Ringed, in the early Middle Ages, on one side by Islam, where religion and law fused, and on the other by a Western Europe, where religion blew through gaping cracks in the structure of society, Byzantines could keep the holy where they needed it ─ in so doing, they preserved a vital part of its meaning ─ it was an unexpected wellspring of delight in the scorching summer of Mediterranean life" (195).

In his discussion of Byzantine holy men Brown develops this basic viewpoint into a stimulating disussion of the manner in which holy men "functioned" as "objective mediators" (132). Brown's discussion of Byzantine holy men is guided by a powerful Durkheimian vision: the sacred, or the holy, functions to integrate society. Brown developed this "functionalist" insight, whose principal weakness is often said to be its inability to explain changes adequately, into a stimulating account of the transformation of late antiquity into early medieval society.

Does this challenging reading of the "biographies" of Byzanitne holy men help us in reading biographies of medieval Chinese Buddhist monks?Were these monks seen as the "locus of the supernatural power"? And if so how did they "function" to integrate society? How did the particular way in which the locus of supernatural power, or the holy, was conceived in medieval Chinese Buddhism affect the way in which the Buddhist community there developed and shaped the entirety of Chinese civilization?These are certainly important and provocative questions, and we will benefit from details of Brown's discussion as we pursue these questions concretely. I find this to be a compelling project, but one that would demand breadth and maturity of scholarship well beyond my reach at the present time. What I should like to do here is to illustrate the kind of analysis that such a study might entail with a small and perhaps peripheral example.