The Eminent Monk • Kuroda Institute Studies in East Asian Buddhism
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I ,I I The Eminent Monk • Kuroda Institute Studies in East Asian Buddhism Studies in Ch'an and Hua-yen Robert M. Gimello and Peter N. Gregory Dagen Studies William R. LaFleur The Northern School and the Formation ofEarly Ch 'an Buddhism John R. McRae Traditions of Meditation in Chinese Buddhism Peter N. Gregory Sudden and Gradual: Approaches to Enlightenment in Chinese Thought Peter N. Gregory Buddhist Hermeneutics Donald S. Lopez, Jr. Paths to Liberation: The Marga and Its Transformations in Buddhist Thought Robert E. Buswell, Jr., and Robert M. Gimello SolO Zen in Medieval Japan William M. Bodiford The Scripture on the Ten Kings and the Making of Purgatory in Medieval Chinese Buddhism Stephen F. Teiser STUDIES IN EAST ASIAN BUDDHISM 10 The Eminent Monk Buddhist Ideals in Medieval Chinese Hagiography John Kieschnick A KURODA INSTITUTE BOOK University of Hawai'i Press Honolulu © 1997 Kuroda Institute All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 97 98 99 00 01 02 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kieschnick, John, 1964- The eminent monk: Buddhist ideals in Medieval Chinese hagiography I John Kieschnick. p. em. - (Studies in East Asian Buddhism; 10) "A Kuroda Institute book." Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8248-1841-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Monastic and religious life (Buddhism)-China-History. 2. Buddhist monks-China. 3. Priests, Buddhist-China. 4. Religious biography-China-History and criticism. I. Series: Studies in East Asian Buddhism; no. 10. BQ6160.C6K54 1997 294.3'657'0922-dc21 97-5496 CIP The Kuroda Institute for the Study of Buddhism and Human Values is a nonprofit, educational corporation founded in 1976. One of its primary objectives is to promote scholarship on the historical, philosophical, and cultural ramifications of Buddhism. In association with the University of Hawai'i Press, the Institute also publishes Classics in East Asian Buddhism, a series devoted to the translation of significant texts in the East Asian Buddhist tradition. University of Hawai'i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources Book design by Kenneth Miyamoto Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 CHAPTER 1: Asceticism 16 CHAPTER 2: Thaumaturgy 67 CHAPTER 3: Scholarship 112 Final Reflections 139 Abbreviations 147 Notes 149 Glossary 187 Works Cited 195 Index 213 v Acknowledgments My THANKS first to my teachers, Bernard Faure, Carl Bielefeldt, and Albert Dien, for their advice and encouragement when I began this project as a graduate student. Thanks also to classmates Philip Kafalas, Mark Csikszentmihalyi, Robin Wagner, and Keith Knapp who read through drafts of the manuscript at that time and offered many sug gestions. When I was rewriting the dissertation for this book, Alan Cole and Elizabeth Morrison offered generous and insightful comments. I am grateful as well to the readers for the Kuroda Institute, T. Griffith Foulk and Daniel Stevenson, for their detailed advice. Preliminary research for the book was carried out with support from the Fulbright Foundation and the Center for Chinese Studies in Taipei. A postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Chinese Studies in Berkeley allowed me to complete the final revisons. Thanks, finally, to my mother, who taught me my first Chinese character, and my father, who gave me my first Chinese book. The Eminent Monk Introduction I I I THIS BOOK is a study of monastic ideals as revealed in three collections of biographies of monks compiled in China from the sixth to the tenth centuries. Although usually based on historical figures, these accounts of the lives of monks contain much that is fabulous and historically inaccurate-tales of monks who lived for hundreds of years, monks who defeated monsters with esoteric spells, monks able to fly through the air, and so on. In the past, scholars have concentrated on winnow ing out such fabulous elements in an attempt to uncover a factual core. While this is often an arduous and complicated task, there is much to be said for this approach, which is crucial if we are to understand what a given monk really said and did at a particular place and time.. In this study, however, I have chosen instead to set aside the historicity of the accounts and accept them as representations of the image of the monk, of what monks were supposed to be. In other words, this is a study of the monastic imagination. Let me explain what I mean with an example from one of the three collections I draw on. The Song Biographies ofEminent Monks (Song gaoseng zhuan), a tenth-century collection of biographies of monks, contains two separate accounts of a meeting between the Chinese monk Daoxuan and the Indian monk Subhakarasirpha (Ch. Shanwu wei), two of the most influential monks of the Tang. One account ap pears in the biography devoted to Subhakarasirpha; the other, in the biography of Daoxuan. According to both accounts, Subhakarasirpha had heard of Daoxuan while still in India, and on arriving in China, asked to meet the famous Chinese monk. The emperor then arranged for the two monks to share a room at a monastery in the capital. At this point, the two accounts diverge. According to Daoxuan's biogra phy, Subhakarasirpha was impressed by Daoxuan's practice of care- 2 The Eminent Monk fully wrapping fleas in a strip of silk and placing them gently on the ground after catching them instead of killing the pests. Subhakara siqlha's biography, on the other hand, recounts that the two roommates had a falling out. Subhakarasiqlha, the biography relates, was a crude and unkempt monk. But one night when he reprimanded Daoxuan for killing a single flea, Daoxuan realized that the foreign monk was in fact a holy man. Yet another account of the encounter between these two monks supplies more detail, claiming that Subhakarasiqlha would come home drunk every night and vomit on the floor. In this account also, Subhakarasiqlha reprimands Daoxuan for killing a single flea. Ifwe could accept any of these accounts as reliable, we could learn important information about these influential monks and the society in which they lived. Had Daoxuan really become famous in India? Did Daoxuan, a leading expert on the monastic regulations, in fact kill insects? Did Subhakarasiqlha actually routinely get drunk? Unfortu nately, we are forced to reject all three accounts, for such an encoun ter between these two men could not have taken place: examination of well-attested dates for the two monks reveals that Daoxuan died a half century before Subhakarasiqlha arrived in China. Therefore, if we hope to reconstruct the lives of these monks, and perhaps even uncover something of their psychology, we would do better to peel away the layers of legend that grew up around them and try to uncover a factual core from material that can be reliably dated to an earlier period. After all, Subhakarasiqlha's contemporaries would have found absurd any reference to a meeting with Daoxuan, a figure they knew to have died some time previous. In this case, this approach works well. Daoxuan's writings contain a number of autobiographical references, none of which makes any reference to a meeting with Sub hakarasiqlba, and which on the contrary date Daoxuan's death to a time before the arrival of Subhakarasiqlha in China.! In short, the ear liest accounts of these monks indicate that the story of their meeting given in the Song Biographies is a later, historically inaccurate legend. Nevertheless, in the case of Daoxuan, as in the case of most Chinese monks, attempts to strip stories of legendary materials meet with only limited success. For while the value of dating the various layers of a biography and tracing its development over time is undeniable, the assumption that fabulous elements were added to a more sober, early biography does not always hold true. To see the problem more clearly, let us for a moment move from the Tang to modem times and exam ine the case of the Chinese monk Xuyun, who lived from 1840 to 1959. Reconstructing the life of Xuyun is considerably easier than recon structing the life of a medieval monk. Not only are we separated from Xuyun by only a few decades, but he also left us an autobiography. As Introduction 3 Xuyun is perhaps the most revered figure in modern Chinese Bud dhism, many legends circulate about his life. In this case, however, we can set aside these later legends and turn instead to an earlier, more reliable source for the monk: his autobiography, the first lines ofwhich begin with his birth: I was born at the headquarters of Quanzhou Prefecture on the last day of the seventh month in the year Gengzi, the twentieth of the Daoguang reign [26 August 1840]. When my mother saw that she had given birth to a fleshy bag, she was frightened, and thinking that there was no hope of bearing child again, she succumbed to her desperation and passed away. The following day an old man selling medicine came to our house and cut open the bag, taking out a male child which was reared by my stepmother.2 Later in the autobiography, Xuyun describes his enlightenment, which occurred after a period of illness during a long bout of meditation. I opened my eyes and suddenly perceived a great brightness similar to broad daylight wherein everything inside and outside the monas tery was discernible to me. Through the wall, I saw the monk in charge of lamps and incense urinating outside, the guest-monk in the latrine, and faraway, boats plying on the river with the trees on both its banks-all were clearly seen: it was just the third watch of the night when this happened.