The Eminent Monk: Buddhist Ideals in Medieval Chinese Hagiography.

• Position: Reviews of Books

The Eminent Monk: Buddhist Ideals in Medieval Chinese Hagiography. By JOHN KIESCHNICK. Kuroda Institute Studies in East Asian Buddhism, 10. Honolulu: UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII PRESS, 1997. Pp. 218. $27 (paper).

During Buddhism's first millennium in China, scholar-monks produced three voluminous, wide-ranging compilations on the lives of notable monks: Huijiao's (d. 554) Biographies of Eminent Monks (Gaoseng zhuan), Daoxuan's (d. 667) Further Biographies of Eminent Monks (Xu gaoseng zhuan), and Zanning's (d. 1001) Song Biographies of Eminent Monks (Song gaoseng zhuan). Each work is a trove of historical material; taken together, they surely constitute one of the largest and most significant bodies of material on the history of any religion. We do not yet have in a Western language a comprehensive textual and interpretive study of any of them taken singly, but John Kieschnick has here boldly attempted a thematic study of all three, and the result is an illuminating overview of key themes in these texts, one that is sensitive to hermeneutical problems and judicious in its conclusions.

Kieschnick aims, as he explains at the book's outset, neither to study these texts as literary artifacts unrelated to actual religious, cultural, and social life, nor to winnow out their fabulous elements so as to recover bare historical "realities"--thus differentiating his approach from the two heretofore dominant ones--but to do something more interesting: to read these accounts "as representations of the image of the monk, of what monks were supposed to be" (p. 1). The work, then, as its subtitle indicates, is a study of selected Chinese Buddhist monastic ideals. This is an astute way to approach hagiographic texts, circumventing tired debates about the historicity of reported events. My only reservation is that I believe it is too simple to read hagiographies as always portraying the ideals of their traditions; while they often do that, they may also at times assume certain ideals (that is, assume readers' familiarity with and acceptance of ideals) in order to play off of them. Kieschnick's view that hag iographies portray how monks were ideally supposed to behave leaves him puzzled by accounts of drunken monastics, for example, whereas it seems quite plausible to me that texts' accounts of drinking do not aim to commend it but to do something more complicated.

The "Introduction" states the bare facts concerning the dates of compilation of the three works, the...