Organizer: Robin Wagner, Harvard University
Chair and Discussant: Koichi Shinohara, McMaster University
Hagiography, or the biographies of saints and religious figures, is a genre that traverses the boundary between religious text and historical source, leaving the scholar with many interpretational challenges. This panel focuses on Chinese Buddhist hagiography from the sixth century to the tenth century and brings together several different approaches to the analysis of these religious and cultural records.
Eugene Wang's paper first looks at a "visual hagiography," tracing the layers of meaning ascribed to a Sui period monument by successive generations of Buddhist sectarians. Robin Wagner then reads a mid seventh century hagiography with an historian's eye, analyzing the stories of wonder working monks for their underlying implications about the political tensions of the period. Wendi Adamek takes a similar approach in her paper, demonstrating how the sectarian and political rivalries of the eighth century form an underlying bias in an early Chan hagiography. Finally, John Kieschnick's paper considers the three great collections of medieval hagiography, bringing up issues of classification and ideology in these works as he explains the roles of monks whose actions were clearly at odds with the norm of "eminence."
Eugene Yuejin Wang, Harvard University
This paper looks at the Dragon Tiger pagoda, commonly regarded as the sanctuary stupa for Master Senglang, a fourth-century recluse monk who initiated the tradition of "mountain Buddhism" in China. While disputing the commonly shared assumption about the monument as a memorial to Senglang, the paper is also concerned with how historical flux shaped and reshaped the import of architectural forms, and how later Buddhist sects willfully reinterpreted earlier monuments for their own purposes.
Robin Chebotariov Wagner, Harvard University
Dated to the middle of the seventh century C.E., Daoxuan's Continued Lives of Eminent Monks (Xu gao seng zhuan) provides the biographies for nearly 500 Buddhist monks, most of whom lived after the early sixth century. The Continued Lives is first of all a history of Buddhism in China and promotion of the faith and its eminent practitioners, yet its subtext is the story unwittingly revealed through symbols and anecdotes of how a large and multi-varied group of charismatics, foreigners, and masters of esoterica established their influence and power through the centers and peripheries of China.
Among the accounts in the Continued Lives of famous Buddhist scholars and religious adepts are virtually innumerable references to extraordinary powers and skills (faith healing, animal taming, demon quelling, prognostication, etc.) attributed to the monks. This paper analyzes the specific anecdotes of these monks' charismatic attributes to reveal some of the underlying dynamics of relations between secular and religious influences in medieval Chinese society, as well as the increasing sectarian rivalries that emerged in the Sui Tang unification.
Wendi Adamek, Stanford University
The Lidai fabao ji (Record of the Transmission of the Dharma Treasure Through the Ages) is an early Chan (ca. 780) sectarian history establishing the lineage claims of the Bao Tang school of Sichuan, and consists of a chronologically arranged series of biographies followed by a collection of dialogues and lectures. This paper demonstrates how the Lidai fabao ji advances its claims for the supremacy of the Bao Tang school by attempting to appropriate symbols of legitimacy valid in both an "old order" and an emerging "new order". The two orders are heuristically characterized as the centrifugal force of the Tang imperial household and aristocratic elites, and the scholastic Buddhist establishments of Changan and Loyang associated therewith; versus the increasingly autonomous provincial military and administrative elites associated with "naturalist" Southern Chan Buddhism.
The latter half of the text advocates an extreme interpretation of "Southern" Chan, propounding an antinomian and minimalist doctrine, while the biographies of the first half of the text reveal an anachronistic attachment to symbols of idealized Buddhist Imperial cooperation. This paper discusses how this complex tension is inherited from the writings of Shenhui (684-758), wherein transmission of the robe serves both the "Southern" mythology of unbroken mind to mind transmission and a notion of lineage and legitimacy after the model of the Imperial ancestor cult.
John Henry Kieschnick, Stanford University
Compiled by prominent scholar monks, the three great collections of medieval Chinese Buddhist hagiography known collectively as "Biographies of Eminent Monks" (gao seng zhuan) can be read in part as an attempt to present the literate public with a positive image of the monk.
In general, the monks in these accounts conform to conventional notions of what a monk should be. Many are selfless ascetics, dedicated to lives of self cultivation, or to proselytizing. They keep to a strict vegetarian diet, eschew wine, women, comfortable clothing, and so on. But curiously, mixed in with these biographies of humble ascetics we occasionally find accounts of monks who are just the opposite.
They openly eat meat, fall down drunk in the middle of town, associate with wayward nuns, and curse their detractors with foul language. These monks are not condemned in the "Biographies"; they are apparently considered just as admirable as their more conventional counterparts. This paper attempts to explain where these figures came from, and what they are doing in what are supposed to be collections of "eminent" monks.
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