Many Biographies – Multiple Individualities: the Identities of the Chinese Buddhist Monk Xuanzang

Max Deeg Many biographies – multiple individualities: the identities of the Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang

1 Introduction

What is usually called the school of Buddhist Illusionism or Idealism (or, as others prefer to call it, Phenomenology),1 Yogācāra (Chin. Yujia-xing 瑜伽行) or Vijñānavāda (Weishi-zong 唯識宗), argues that all phenomena experienced as real are just projections of the mind (Skt. citta, Chin. xin 心) or consciousness (Skt. vijñāna, Chin. shi 識) and have no ultimate and intrinsic reality (Skt. asvab- hāva, Chin. wu(zi)xing 無(自)性).2 In this chapter, I will extend and apply this very simplified description of Yogācāra to the question of (religious) individuality and individualisation. The argument I will offer is that processes of individualisation, those ascribed to individuals and groups as well as those described by others in biographical (or auto-biographical) narratives, are always (and only) imagined (Skt. prajñaptimātra, Chin. weijiashe 唯仮設) and are not, thus, historically and/ or ontologically real or ‘true’. I assume that the individual under discussion, the Chinese monk and East Asian Yogācāra master par excellence Xuanzang 玄奘 (600/602–664), would fully agree with such a statement. In this paper I focus on two things: first, on the ways in which individualisation is projected – or, according to my chosen terminology, ‘functionalised’ – in the historical sources in the form of narratives about one specific individual; and second, on how this form of individualisation is dependent on specific social and cultural contexts, preconditions, and the (individual) intentionalities of the agents involved. I am aware of the fact that this ‘narrative individualisation’, to give it a preliminarily name, is different from certain other expressions of individualisation, such as discourses concerning ‘conceptions of an immortal individual soul’ (‘Vorstellungen von einer unsterblichen Einzelseele’) and other religious experiences and ‘expressive actions’ (‘expressives Handeln’).3 To me, however, a critical discussion of the genre of ‘narrative individualisation’, the use

1 E.g. Lusthaus 2002. 2 Among the many publications on Yogācāra, see, for example, Schmithausen 2014, and Lust- haus 2002. 3 See KFOR 1013/2 Fortsetzungsantrag Rüpke/Mulsow: Individualisierung: 6f.

Open Access. © 2019 Max Deeg, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110580853-045 914 Max Deeg of autobiography and biographies as sources for tracing processes of individualisation, is crucial for the wider discussion of such processes.4 Critical reflection on biography, from a common sense standpoint the most natural (written or oral) expression of individuality, raises the question of whether or not everything subsumed under the label of ‘individualisation’ is, in some way, projected and/or imagined in the sense of Yogācāra philosophy. If such a stance is accepted, and be it only provisionally, the concept of ‘individuality’ becomes quite fuzzy. The agency and autonomous authority of the subject or individual over his or her individual biographical identity and, thus, the assumed epistemo- logical hierarchy between autobiography and biography, becomes blurred. This is particularly the case if the contingency of autobiographical memory and its fixation (German: Festschreibung)5 is taken into account to the same degree as the selective power (and, at the same time, weakness) of the biographer. In the end, all these narrative expressions relating to an individual – and I include here also non-written media, such as pictorial, performative, or cinematic expressions – are entangled and embedded in their specific socio-historical contexts the analysis of which will not necessarily bring us closer to ‘the individual’. Nev- ertheless, an analysis will at least enable us to understand how a specific ‘individuality’ is construed and (thus) understood in a specific context. This sort of analysis will, then, contribute to a more general understanding of the processes of individualisation. With reference to Xuanzang, my own chosen example (German: Fall- beispiel), I agree with the basic assumption of the KFG that processes or discourses of individualisation (and their analyses) are complex and result from ‘contingent constellations […] in which individuals become central parameters of determination of processes of socialisation […]’.6 As might be expected, I am very much interested in the ‘become’ here: how and under what circumstances

4 By this I do not mean to ask for a ‘biographical turn’ (Chamberlain, Bornat, Wengraf 2000) in the overall context of studies on individualisation. 5 There have been some recent analytical publications on this aspect of autobiography, ranging from the radical statement of the ‘impossibility of auto/biography’ (Evans 1999) to a more nu- anced discussion of the literary genre (Olney 2014). In fact, quite often modern autobiography is not so naïve as to be unaware of its constructiveness, as e.g. expressed in the title of the autobiography of the native American writer Gerald Vizenor, ‘Interior Landscapes – Autobiograph- ical Myths and Metaphors’ (Vizenor 2009). The ‘closest’ example in classical German literature is Goethe’s autobiographical ‘Dichtung und Wahrheit’. In the context of East Asian Buddhist biography, this dismissal of the fundamental distinction of authority between biography and autobiography is indirectly made by Kieschnick 1997, 3. 6 KFOR 1013/2, 5: ‘[…] aus kontingenten Konstellationen resultierende Prozesse, in denen Indi- viduen zu zentralen Bestimmungsgrößen der Vergesellschaftung […] werden’. Many biographies – multiple individualities 915 is an individual first made ‘parametrical’ in narrative terms and then becomes determinative in some way or another (institutionalisation?)? The answer seems to lie in the ‘constructedness’ of religious biography and in its tendency towards function: the religious figure represents a specific aspect – or function, as I will call it for the sake of broader applicability and concreteness – of the religious ideals of a certain time and social group: the ascetic, the scholar, the martyr, the self-immolator, etc.7 My individual ‘object’ of choice, the Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang, seems to offer a useful case study for playing through some of these basic ideas because of the impact he had in different periods (early medieval, medieval, early modern, and modern), different regions (Asian and Western) and different ideological contexts, religious as well as secular. This impact is reflected, first of all, in the fact that Xuanzang’s biography has been received, projected and remodelled constantly, all the way up to the present day.8 Several biographies are extant (see below), with the earliest being nearly contemporary with the lifetime of the monk. These biographies were themselves the starting point(s) for a further re-imagination, emphasising certain aspects (functions) of Xuanzang that were represented by particular features in the earlier biographies. I would thus claim that the creation of Xuanzang’s different biographies reflects a rare historical process during which many identities9 are constructed and multiple individualities are implied.

7 In the context of Muslim biographical literature, Cooperson 2000 identifies the legitimacy of the followership of Muhammad as a leading motif. This could also be claimed for certain strands of Buddhist biographical sources which are concerned with (correct) succession of heirs (patriarchs, Chin. zu 祖) of the dharma of the Buddha, as are so prominent in the biographical snippets that form the ‘transmission of the lamp’ (chuandeng 傳燈) literary genre of Chan 禪. 8 The latest example of such a biographical construction is the cinematic re-enactment of Xuan- zang’s life, Datang-Xuanzang 大唐玄奘 (2016), an Indo-Chinese co-production which was agreed upon at the highest political level during the visit of India’s president Narendra Modi to China on the 14th to the 16th of May 2015. The movie was shot over an extremely short period at original historical sites in China, Central Asia, and India and had its debut in Chinese cinemas in April 2016, less than a year after production was set in motion. 9 I am not going to discuss here the relation between the terms – and underlying concepts of – ‘individual’, ‘individualisation’, and ‘identity’, but would like to point out the possible applicability of ‘identity’ for a discussion of processes of individualisation in the sense that the concept seems to be anchored somewhere on the spectrum between individualisation and de-individualisation/socialisation. For a recent sociological study of the formation of religious identity in auto-biographical reflections, in which, surprisingly, the questions of ‘individuality’ and ‘individualisation’ are not really taken into account, see Lorenz 2016. 916 Max Deeg

2 Buddhism and individualisation

We can start with some preliminary general observations concerning individualisation in the context of Buddhism, if only to cut through and problematise some popular preconceptions about this religion. According to a wide-spread modern conceptualisation, Buddhism appears to be a perfect example of religious self- reflective individualisation, with this notion being crystallised in the practice of meditation. This is reflected by and in the standard narrative (biography) of the founder himself,10 the individual Śākyamuni Siddhārtha Gautama, called the Buddha11 after finding his ‘true’ identity through a long period of contemplation on the experience of enlightenment or awakening (bodhi). Despite their genre, it is possible to read the stories of the Buddha’s previous lives (jātaka) in the light of individualisation: from individual existence to existence (rebirth), the bodhisat- tva (an aspirant for Buddhahood) develops and cultivates the characteristics necessary for the final goal, the attainment of ultimate awakening (samyaksaṃbodhi) which results in transcending individuality (anātman, ‘without self’) (Reynolds 1997; Appleton 2010). One could even argue that such individualisation in the previous existences and in the first part of the Buddha’s biography, prior to his awakening, finds its materialised expression in the localisation of some of these stories. A number of the stories occur in concrete places in South Asia and beyond: one can, therefore, go to the locations and ‘witness’ or ‘experience’ the reality of such individuations of the Buddha in his previous lives.12 This is underlined by the opposite tendency towards a kind of de-individualisation in the Buddha’s life post-enlightenment, which is ‘boringly’ stereotype and in which only two specific places are identified: the place of his first sermon (the ‘Deer Garden’, mṛgadāva, in Sārnāth near Vārāṇasī) and the place of his death or parinirvāṇa (Kuśinagara). On the doctrinal side, the teaching of retribution for individually committed acts and their consequences (karma) drives forward this connectedness and entanglement of individual lives (and deaths) (see Appleton 2014). However, if we look deeper into the doctrinal tenets of Buddhism and their narrative ‘translation’, the individuality of the Buddha becomes blurred again: on the one hand, the basic doctrine of ‘selflessness’ (anātman, Chin. wuwo 無我) and the (historically later) teaching that all phenomena are without substance,

10 Discussions about the role and function of religious founder figures are collected in Gray 2016. However, the question of the function of biography in and outside the tradition is strangely absent and overwritten by a focus on ‘religious invention’. 11 On the historical development of the Buddha biographies, see Deeg 2010. 12 These localisations are mainly traceable in the records of Chinese Buddhist travellers. For concrete examples, see Deeg 2005. Many biographies – multiple individualities 917

‘empty’ (śūṇya, Chin. kong 空), indicate a rather uncompromising approach to individuality, denying even the possibility of its substantial existence. Further- more, from a very early period there existed the concept of multiple Buddhas of the past (Kāśyapa, Konakamuni, Krakucchanda, etc.).13 These were then ascribed biographies that have the same basic pattern14 as that of the Buddha himself, who explains the common scheme by reference to the example of the Buddha Vipaśyin. This, then, would be a clear example of de-individualisation of and by the one who is conceived in Western scholarship as the historical Buddha Gautama Siddhārtha Śākyamuni.15 One could even argue whether an intentional individualisation of the Buddha existed at all in pre-modern Buddhist traditions, or whether it is not, at least partially, a construct of historicist-positivist Western interpretation starting in the nineteenth century.16 Both aspects point towards a tension between individuality and the normative uniformity asked for by the exemplary nature of the great individual. In the case of the Buddha, one could argue that the multiple episodes in the different versions of his life story17 refer to constant and continuous attempts at re-individualising the de-individualised biographical scheme.18 The expression of this tension between individuality and the (more or less de-individualised) model role or the (almost)

13 This idea can be traced back at least as far as the 3rd century BCE, when the Mauryan emperor Aśoka referred in one of his pillar inscriptions to the Buddha of the past Kanakamuni (and also to another Buddha Krakucchanda), for whom he had enlarged a stūpa in the vicinity of the historical Buddha Śākyamuni’s hometown, Kapilavastu: see Deeg 2004. 14 Textually, this is exemplified in the (Skt.) Mahāvadānasūtra – P. Mahāpadānasutta in the ‘Longer Collection’ (Dīghanikāya) of the Pāli Suttapiṭaka, with its parallel in the Dīrghāgama/ Chang-ahan-jing 長阿含經 of the Chinese canon. See Waldschmidt 1953 & 1956; Fukita 2003. 15 The tension between this historicisation and the historical inaccessibility of the Buddha raises questions about the validity, or at least demonstrability, of the Axial Age theory in relation to individualisation. In the light of what is stated here about the biographical process, in the sense of the gradual emergence of biographies as narrative individualisations, the same questions would also arise for other eastern ‘religious’ ‘founder figures’, such as Confucius (Kongzi), Laozi, Zhuangzi, Zarathushtra, etc., who are so central to Jaspers’ argument: see the first paragraph in his subchapter ‘A. Characterisation of the Axial Period’ (Jaspers 1953, 2). 16 Ironically, there is a link between this historicisation of the Buddhist biographical texts, through processes of harmonisation, selection and interpretation, in the 19th century, and Xuan- zang’s approach in his ‘Records of the Western World’, with its textual and archaeological exploration and reconstruction of an early form of Buddhism in India. I touch on this very briefly below. 17 Reynolds 1976 rightly speaks of the processual and re-interpretative character of the Buddha biography, of the ‘many lives of the Buddha’. 18 This seems to be reflected in what Jonathan Silk (2003) has called the paradox of the Bud- dha’s biography, in which constant negotiation of the Buddha’s human-ness (individualisation) and his transcendent super-human-ness (de-individualisation) is at play. 918 Max Deeg unreachable religious and soteriological status of the founder19 is mostly found in the genre of Buddhist biography or hagiography; autobiographies in the stricter sense of the genre are absent in the early period. It is in this genre of hagiography that I would like to situate my analysis of the various attempts to narratively indi- vidualise one particular individual, the Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang.

3 Biography in South Asia and China

Before I introduce my sources, it will be worth outlining some fundamental differences between South Asian and East Asian biographical literature20 should be outlined. Ancient and early medieval South Asia (c. 500BCE-1000 CE) has no clear biographical (or autobiographical) genre. What we find in, for instance, Vedic and late Vedic literature are episodes about the deeds or conversations of exceptional individuals, mostly brāhmaṇas and kings. The religious ‘revolu- tion’ – Jaspers’ postulated shift in the Axial Age – of the śramaṇa movements in the sixth/fifth century BCE Gangetic plain area resulted in the establishment of institutionalised religious ‘orders’, among which Buddhism and Jainism were the most successful. The desire to memorialise the founding figures of these orders, Siddhārtha Gautama Buddha and Mahāvīra Jina, nurtured the need for biographies of exceptional individuals. In South Asian (Indian) Buddhism, biographies were for a long time only partial and were normally integrated into a wider anthological context of other literary genres and giving biographical bits and pieces rather than constituting independent biographies. There are rare texts that can be understood as autobiographical statements, such as the ‘Songs of the Elder Monks’ (Theragāthā) and ‘Songs of the Elder Nuns’ (Therīgāthā) in the Pāli canon, but these are an exceptional Theravāda tradition and stand out as unique in the South Asian Buddhist literary production. As complex texts and parts of the Theravāda canon, these originally anonymous verses were ascribed to specific monks or nuns, partly in

19 Here it is important to make a distinction between the soteriological final goal of ‘becoming a Buddha’ and an ‘imitiatio Buddhae’ which is hardly found expressed in Buddhist biographical literature. The biographies of the Buddha are never a direct exhortation to follow his example, as the gospels are, at least to a certain extent, for the concept of the ‘imitatio Christi’ (see e.g. Capes 2003). 20 A lot of ink has been spilled on Asian religious biography – see e.g. Granoff, Shinohara 1988 – but so far there has been no comparative-critical approach to what ‘biographies’ in the different Asia contexts have in common or to what makes them different in terms of structure, function and meaning. Many biographies – multiple individualities 919 order to localise and contextualise them in the Buddha’s lifetime and his direct biographical environment.21 The biographies of the Buddha and certain of his disciples are, at least in their extant form, of a relatively late date, although evidence for the formation of a biography in the form of standardised episodes from the Buddha’s life can be dated back to the 3rd century BC on the basis of (aniconic)22 art-historical evidence (stūpas of Sāñcī or Bharhūt). These scenes mainly depict episodes or moments in the Buddha’s life that are religiously important and linked to places of pilgrimage and worship, e.g. the four major events of birth (janman, in Lumbinī), enlightenment (bodhi, in Bodhgayā), first sermon (dharmacakrapravartana, in Sārnāth near Vārāṇasī), and the final extinction (parinirvāṇa, in Kuśinagara).23 Fully-fledged biographies only emerged gradually24 and consisted of complete (and over times still growing and expanding) lives of the Buddha,25 his disciples (Ray 1999, 105–212) or Buddhist patriarchs (e.g. the patriarch Upagupta: see Strong 1992), and other eminent individuals.26 They reflect a clear tendency towards narrative individualisation insofar as they try to cover the full life-time of the protagonist. They include not only specific episodes that are important for doctrinal or soteriological reasons but also ‘minor episodes’ like the young Siddhārtha’s education at school, his marriage, the birth of his first son, and so

21 Von Hinüber 1996, 51ff.; Ray 1999, 79–104. Shaw 2010, 39ff., does away, too simply in my opinion, with the complex textual transmission process in order to categorise these texts and others from the Pāli canon under the rubric of ‘autobiography’. One might talk, as with the early Chinese cases mentioned below, of a pervasive trend towards individualisation of anonymous texts or text corpora over time. 22 I.e. the Buddha is not physically visible but only represented through symbols, such as a seat on which he is supposed to sit or an umbrella underneath which he should stand or walk. On the aniconic period of the earliest Buddhist art, see Karlsson 1999, and more generally on the development of narrative Buddhist art, Dehejia 1997. 23 On the development of the Buddha biography, see Deeg 2010. 24 This development is reflected in some biographical texts which only cover a certain period of the Buddha’s life, such as the Catuṣpariṣatsūtra (from the night of enlightenment to the first conversions) and the Mahāparinirvāṇasūtra (the last months in the life of the Buddha). 25 Mostly anonymous, like the Lalitavistara, the Mahāvastu, or the later Nidānakathā (Pāli). One of the oldest extant biographical texts, the poem Buddhacarita, is attributed to the poet Aśvaghoṣa (second century CE). Other early biographies are only preserved in Chinese translations; some of these only deal with a part of the Buddha’s life. 26 Like the legendary life of the king Aśoka, the Aśokāvadāna: Strong 1983. Aśoka provides a good example of individualisation in ‘ego-documents’ (‘Ego-Dokumente’; Aśoka’s own inscriptions) and narrative individualisation in the form of a hagio-biography (Aśokāvadāna): see Deeg 2009b. The different biographies discussed in Schober 1997 range heterogeneously from Buddha biographies to modern Buddhist individuals and are restricted to South and South East Asia. 920 Max Deeg on.27 The emergence of this biographical literature, starting around the beginning of the Christian era, is complemented by the narrative (iconic) Buddhist art of Gandhāra. This flourished in the Northwest of the Indian subcontinent between the late first and the fourth centuries of the Common Era and is often called Indo- Greek because of the obvious Greek stylistic influences. In China, on the other hand, biographical writing – again, autobiography is a relative newcomer in Chinese literature (see Levering 2002; on later Neo-Confucian autobiography, see Taylor 1978) – about individuals has been part of Chinese official (i.e. imperial) and semi-official28 (Buddhist or Daoist) historiography from the 1st century BC onwards (see Nienhauser 2011). The first biographies appear as part of the earliest comprehensive historiographical endeavour, which resulted in the Shiji 史記 (‘Records of the Historian’) of the Chinese ‘arch-’historiographer Sima Qian 司馬遷 (c. 145–86 BC). Starting with this model, almost all subsequent Chinese historiographical writings include biographies (zhuan 傳) of not only emperors but also other eminent individuals, such as ministers, religious figures, and outstanding intellectuals. The appearance of such biographies in one specific and rather comprehensive section became a mandatory feature in historical writing.29 It might even be argued that the traces of Chinese historical writing which survive Chinese antiquity – the ‘Classic of Document’ (Shujing 書經) and some poems in the ‘Classic of Songs (or Poems)’ (Shijing 詩經) – show rudimentary features of biographical individualisation in their presentation of the mythical past in terms of the action and deeds of individual cultural heroes like Yu 禹 or Yao 堯 (other examples are the pseudo-historical founders of the Western Zhou dynasty (trad. 1046–771 BC), Duke Wen (Wen-gong 文公) and his son, King Wu (Wu-wang 武王)). It is generally assumed that Buddhism was introduced into China in the first century CE. By the fifth century, Buddhism had become a consolidated, though not undisputed, part of Chinese cultural and religious discourse (see Zürcher 2007). Beside the translations of Indian (or Central Asian) Buddhist texts, autochthonous Chinese texts, such as commentaries and catalogues of scriptures, were also being

27 There is a clear tendency to concentrate on the pre-enlightenment period of the Buddha’s life, which may point to a structural ‘division of labour’ between a part of the biography that lends itself more easily to narrative individualisation (pre-enlightenment) and a part that reflects the ‘institutionalised’ and de-individualised role of the Buddha as an omniscient religious teacher and transcendent being (post-enlightenment). 28 ‘Semi-official’ insofar as most of the religious literature had to be acknowledged, at least in principle, by the respective court bureaus. 29 For an overview of the entanglement of biography and historiography during Chinese history and its change in the late nineteenth century, see Moloughney 1992. On the development of Chi- nese biographical writing in the twentieth century, see Moloughney 1994. Many biographies – multiple individualities 921 produced. In the early fifth century, the Chinese ‘push’ for biographies30 began to impact Buddhist writers and the first collections of biographies of eminent monks ((Liang-)Gaoseng-zhuan (梁)高僧傳, ‘Biographies of Eminent Monks (of the Liang [dynasty])’, 519, T.2059) were collated by Huijiao 慧皎 (497–554).31 Such biographical anthologies were then produced on a fairly regular basis throughout the dynastic history of China, loosely following the pattern of other historiographical writings in collating the biographies of an earlier period (or dynasty): Xu(or: Tang 唐)- Gaoseng-zhuan 續高僧傳 (‘Continued Biographies of Eminent Monks (of the Tang [dynasty])’, 665, T.2060), by Daoxuan 道宣 (596–667); Song-Gaoseng-zhuan 宋高僧傳 (‘Biographies of Eminent Monks of the Song [dynasty]’, 988, T.2061) by Zanning 贊寧, Daming-Gaoseng-zhuan 大明高僧傳 (‘Biographies of Eminent Monks of the Great Ming [dynasty]’, 1600, T.2062) by Ruxing 如惺. These biographical ‘anthologies’ are organised and structured in a way which already reflects what could be called the typical hagiographic tendency of de- individualisation: the collections are divided into ‘types’ of expertise, with the divisions based on the functional roles of the protagonists. Huijiao provides the model for this approach by dividing the biographies into the following categories, followed more or less by his successors: 1. translators (yijing 譯經); 2. exegetes (yijie 義解); 3. wonder-workers (shenyi 神異); 4. practitioners of meditation (xichan 習禪); 5. specialists in explaining monastic rules (minglü 明律); 6. self- immolators (wangshen 亡身); 7. specialists in reciting Buddhist texts (songjing 誦經); 8. collectors of (special) religious merit (xingfu 興福); 9. hymnodists (jingshi 經師); and 10. proselytisers (changdao 唱導). The singling out of translators as the first group is justified by the role they played in the transmission and spread of Bud- dhism throughout China (Kieschnick 1997, 8f.).

30 As for Buddhist biographies modelled along the lines of the established biographical model – minus the hagiographical features and themes – of the secular historiographies, Kieschnick 1997, 5, states aptly that they are ‘in style and structure squarely in the tradition of secular biography established […] in the Shiji and Hanshu’. As part of the classical Chinese division of scriptures and categorised under ‘historical texts’, biographies could even escape the destruction of literature in periods of anti-Buddhist persecution and survive the prohibition of publication and dissemination: Storch 2014, 14ff. 31 See Kieschnick 1997; 2011. Huijiao’s compilation was, in a way, a reaction to a slightly earlier work by the monk Baochang 寶唱 (464-post 514), the Mingseng-zhuan 名僧傳 (‘Biographies of Famous Monks’), of which only fragments have survived: see Wright 1954. Baochaong also compiled a collection of ‘Biographies of Nuns’ (Biqiuni-zhuan 比丘尼傳), dated 516; see Tsai 1995. The biographical ‘push’ was so strong that biographies of translators of the type of the Gaoseng-zhuan were already incorporated in one of the earliest Chinese Buddhist catalogues, the ‘Collection of the Records of the Compilation of the Three Baskets (tripiṭaka, i.e. the Buddhist canon)’ (Chu-sanzang-jiji 出三藏記集, 510–518) by the monk Sengyou 僧祐 (445–518). 922 Max Deeg

Some hagiographical (de-individualising) topoi are at play in the individual biographies: already in their early years the protagonists demonstrate a high degree of intelligence or clairvoyance, a fondness for traditional Chinese and/ or Buddhist learning and/or devotion, and their death is very often accompanied by miraculous events. It cannot be overlooked, however, that some individual monks are granted more space and individual biographical features, although this reflects their specific importance for the spread or development of the Bud- dhist teaching or the Buddhist institution(s) rather than referring to a more accu- rate historical reality.32 The biographies are mostly hagiographies in the sense of ‘representations of the image of the monk, of what monks were supposed to be’ in ‘monastic imagination’ (Kieschnick 1997, 1). Motivation and intentionality influenced by and drawn from the wider Chinese cultural context had an impact on the de-invidualising aspects of Chinese Bud- dhist (and Daoist) biographical writing,33 as reflected in, for instance, the need to show Buddhism’s (and Buddhists’) positive relationship with the imperial state.34

4 Biographies of Xuanzang

While in the cases of most Buddhist monks of whom biographies were written in Chinese there exists, as a rule, only one biography, much more material of different genres and types is preserved on Xuanzang.35 Those works that can be called

32 Among the earlier monks, I only want to point out the biographies of Shi Daoan 釋道安 (312–385) and Kumārajīva/Jiumoluoshi 鳩摩羅什 (343–413) in the Gaoseng-zhuan, the first being the earliest polymath and synthesiser of Chinese Buddhism and the latter (projected as) the most eminent translator of the period (on Shi Daoan, see Zürcher 2007, 184ff.; Kumārajīva’s biography was translated into English by Johannes Nobel 1927). 33 The Confucian and Daoist precedents of these ‘extrapolated’ and religiously specialised biographical collections were the Liexian-zhuan 列仙傳 (‘Collected Biographies of Immortals’) by Liu Xiang 劉向 (fl. 77–76 BC) and the Shenxian-zhuan 神仙傳 (‘Biographies of Divine Tran- scendents’) Ge Hong 葛洪; see Campany 2002, particularly 98–117. 34 Timothy Barrett speaks of an ambivalence towards religious biographies in China that ‘has much to do with the emergence of a new form of biography of a more religious sort into a culture that had hitherto been dominated by vitae structured either by bureaucratic values, […], or by their inversion […]’ (Barrett 2002, 2). 35 When speaking of different biographies I do not mean the parallel biographies in the earlier collections, such as the Chu-sanzang-jiji, the Mingseng-zhuan and the Gaoseng-zhuan, which mostly copied material from one to the other and showed relatively little difference in their projection of biographical individualities. These parallel biographies may, however, reflect the different approaches of their authors to one and the same individual, as Yang has shown in a study Many biographies – multiple individualities 923 biographies in the strict sense were written partly during his lifetime or after his death.36 However, the fact that several slightly different biographies exist does not help us to get closer to the ‘real Xuanzang’37 through a process of ‘historical distillation’. Rather, the varying accounts reflect different layers of interpretation of the individual Xuanzang and his life. Before introducing these biographies it will be worth considering the text which most triggered the imagination of his contemporary audience and later recipients, the voluminous ‘description’ of Central Asia and India based on his sixteen-year-long journey to India. This work is the famous ‘Records of the Western Regions of the Great Tang [Dynasty]’ (Datang-xiyu-ji 大唐西域記, T.2087; here abbreviated as ‘Records’) in twelve chapters, commissioned by the second Tang emperor Taizong 太宗 (r. 626–649) and written in less than one year after Xuanzang’s return to China in 645. The ‘Records’ are not, as usually assumed,38 a personal record of the monk’s journey and nor can they stricto sensu be called descriptive documen- tary.39 Rather, they combine the fulfilment of the task given by the emperor, to give information about the different kingdoms of the Western Regions40 (a very

on Kumārajīva’s biographies (Lu 2004), which anticipate to a certain extent the situation in the case of Xuanzang’s biographies. 36 An overview and discussion of these biographies is given by Mayer 1992, 34ff. 37 This refers, of course, to the well-known British Sinologist Arthur Waley’s booklet ‘The Real Tripiṭaka’ (1961), which is dedicated to the ‘historical’ Xuanzang in comparison with the literarily- transformed figure of the famous Ming-period novel Xiyou-ji (‘Records of the Journey to the West’) (see below). Waley had paraphrased this latter text in English as ‘Monkey’ (1942) almost two decades earlier and with such success that the famous scholar and translator deemed it necessary to put things right and do justice to the historical figure at the root of the novel. 38 This assumption is fuelled by the fact that the Western translations of the ‘Records’ (Stanislas Julien, Samuel Beal, Li Rongxi) insert a personal pronoun (‘I’) where there is none in the Chinese text and thus imply inner-textual agency where, again, there is none. This has serious herme- neutical consequences when, to give only one example, Malcolm Eckel (1994) uses the text as an eye-witness (‘to see the Buddha’) as the basis for a ‘revisioning’ of the role of the Buddha in Buddhist religion and philosophy. 39 Mayer 2000, 156, correctly speaks of ‘die Abwesenheit […] eines auktoriellen Subjektes und eines implizierten Betrachters’, although I do not share his view that this is due to a Buddhist negation of the substantiality of the individual person (p.161). Rather, I would argue that he had to write in the non-auctorial genre of ‘Records’ (ji 記, zhuan 傳, zhi 志) about the Western regions that had already been compiled during the Sui dynasty in the wake of the western expansion of the Chinese empire. 40 A clear indication that the text was written for this purpose is the fact that it starts not in Chang’an, the Tang capital and departure point, but in Central Asian Kuča and ends in Khotan on the southwestern corner of the Tarim basin (Chinese Turkestan or the modern Autonomous Region of Xinjiang), i.e. exactly at the border of Chinese-controlled territory in 629 when Xuan- zang travelled West and in 645 when he returned to China. 924 Max Deeg stretched concept in the Tang period, comprising the traditional Central Asian regions but also including Iran/Persia and India), with Xuanzang’s own aim of describing Buddhist sacred places and educating the emperor and other high- ranked readers at the Tang court (Deeg 2009a; 2012). A reader comes looking for autobiographical statements in the ‘Records’ will walk away quite disappointed. The text does, however, contain a few self-references in the report of the monk’s meeting with the North Indian emperor Harṣavardhana Śīlāditya (Harṣa) of Kanauj (Kanyākubja) (c. 590–647).41 These may best be taken as biographical snippets through which Xuanzang presents himself as a kind of ambassador of Chinese culture and informant for Harṣa about the situation in China, clearly aimed towards the Tang ruler Taizong as a captatio benevolentiae self-recommendation. Yet, the passage is interesting in that it reflects individual agency in an autographically-projected form and is thus worth quoting in full:

At that time Śīlāditya was inspecting the kingdom of Khajuṅghira and issued an order to King Kumāra (of Kāmarūpa/Assam) [saying]: “It is appropriate that the visiting śramaṇa from afar in Nālanda should immediately come and attend our meeting”. Thereupon King Kumāra went to see [Xuanzang]. Śīlāditya, after having taken the trouble, said: “From which kingdom did you come and what is your wish?” [Xuanzang] answered: “I have come from the kingdom of the Great Tang in search of the law of the Buddha”. The king said: “In which direction is the kingdom of the Great Tang situated?” [Xuanzang] answered: “It is several ten thousand li to the North-East. It is the kingdom which in India is called Mahācīna”. The king said: “I have already heard that there is the heaven’s son, the King of Qin in Mahācīna. When he was small he had a high spirit, when he had grown up he was a gifted warrior. Before, when the former dynasty was collapsing in disorder and parts of the land were divided, fighting had arisen and the people were tormented, the King of Qin early had conceived a strategy and sensed great compassion, rescued the sentient beings, pacified the region between the oceans, cultivation was far spread, the [imperial] kindness was harmo- niously [established] in far [regions], distant regions and foreign countries took refuge and submitted to him, all the people carry along his well-balanced instruction, all perform the ‘Music of the King of Qin’s breaking the battle-lines’,42 his eulogy has been heard here since long – isn’t there really praise of his virtues? Isn’t the Great Tang like this?” [Xuanzang] answered: “What is called Zhina 至那 is the former name of the kingdom, Datang 大唐 is the name of the kingdom of our ruler. Before he had ascended to the throne he was called King of Qin. Now that he has already ascended to the throne he is called Son of Heaven. When the fortune of the former dynasty came to an end the living beings had no ruler, fighting and turmoil arose and people were cruelly injured. The King of Qin, [endowed with] heaven’s grace, opened his mind with compassion and, stimulated by his dignity, the calamities of the people were wiped out. The eight directions were pacified and ten thousand kingdoms

41 An analysis of Xuanzang’s description of Harṣavardhana and his rule is given in Deeg 2016. 42 This (Shengong-)Qinwang-pochen-yue (神功)秦王破陣樂 was a dancing performance on the occasion of Li Shimin’s 李世民 – the later emperor Taizong – suppression of the rebellion of Liu Wuzhou 劉武周 in the year 619, when he was still king (or prince) of Qin. Many biographies – multiple individualities 925

paid tribute to him. He loves and cultivates the four kinds of living beings and venerates the three jewels. He levied taxes and issued amnesty on capital punishment. The national expenditure achieved a surplus; the etiquette of the people is flawless [and] their behaviour has undergone a great change [to an extent] that it is difficult to describe it in detail”. Śīlād- itya said: “How magnificent! The people of this land are blessed [and should] be grateful to their sacred ruler”. (T.2087.894c.20ff.-895a.18)

The actual dialogue between the two certainly did not occur in this form43 but the written version reflects a self-understanding or self-projection of Xuanzang as a mediator between the two great empires of China and India and as an educator for both the Indian king, by informing him about China and her ruler, and the Chinese emperor Taizong, by showing him, in the passages before and after this dialogue, the ideal behaviour of an Indian Buddhist king. This self-assumed role is taken up in all the biographies and even pushed further when the Indian king pays the highest honour to the Chinese monk because of his status as an eminent Buddhist scholar and monastic and even urges him not to return to China. Xuanzang’s biography in the Xu-Gaoseng-zhuan (‘Continued Biographies of Eminent Monks’; T.2060.446c.8–458c.13), written by his short-term collaborator, the Buddhist polymath Daoxuan, is one of the earliest biographical sketches. According to the colophon of the compilation, the first draft of the text was made in 645, the year of Xuanzang’s return to China. There is broad agreement that, if this date is correct, Daoxuan made many changes and additions to the compilation over the years before his death in 667 (Wagner 1995, 78–81). A relatively brief individual biography, i.e. not part of a biographical anthol- ogy, is the Datang-gu-sanzang-Xuanzang-fashi-xingzhuang 大唐故三藏玄奘法師行狀 (‘Brief [Postumous] Biography of the Deceased Tripiṭaka Dharma Master Xuanzang of the Great Tang’, one fascicle, T.2052) by Mingxiang 冥詳 (dates unknown). While Daoxuan’s biography and the long individual ‘Biography’ (see below) share elements and descriptive patterns – sometimes repeating each other word for word – this biographical sketch goes in a different direction. It treats the journey to India in a very unsystematic and eclectic manner, focusing on Xuan- zang as a translator and exemplary monastic figure. A biographical sketch which draws mainly on the previous biographies is preserved in the older official historiography of the Tang (Jiu-Tangshu 舊唐書 191),44

43 One inner-textual indication of this is that some word-by-word passages of this dialogue are repeated in the description of a meeting between Xuanzang and King Kumāra, the ruler of Kāmarūpa/Assam: T.2087.927b.14–927c.14. 44 Compiled by Liu Xu 劉昫 and Zhang Zhaoyuan 張昭遠 around the middle of the tenth century. The biography is omitted in the ‘corrected’ new historiography of the Tang, the Xin-Tangshu 新唐書, compiled by Ouyang Xiu 歐陽修 between 1044 and 1060. 926 Max Deeg a genre which normally does not include biographies of Buddhist individuals. On the one hand, this demonstrates the status that the monk had attained in Chinese cultural memory towards the end of the first millennium. On the other hand, it rel- ativises Xuanzang’s status and position as an extraordinary personality by listing him under the category of ‘[Individuals endowed with] magical and specific techni- cal [skills]’ (fangzhi 方伎) as one among a group of less celebrated monks (seng 僧). This biographical sketch focuses mainly on his translation activities and his role as an exegete of Buddhist scriptures who was supported and protected by the emperors Taizong and Gaozong 高宗 (r. 649–683). It is his connection with the court that is important to the biographer, a fact demonstrated also by the focus on Xuanzang’s funeral, an important indicator of social status in the early Tang Empire. Getting wrong both the year of death (661 instead of 664) and his age at the time of death (56 instead of either 6445 or 62), the text emphasises that the funeral was attended by many members of the social elite (shinü 士女): ‘In the sixth year [or the era Xianqing 顯慶, i.e. 661] [Xuanzang] died, at that time 56 years old; [his] funeral was on the White Deer plain, and the funeral was attended by several ten thousands of ladies and gentlemen’.46 The most extensive biography, however, was written by Xuanzang’s disciple Huili 慧立 (fl. 629–665) and redacted and extended by the monk Yancong 彥悰 (fl. 650–688), the ‘Biography of the Tripiṭaka dharma master from the Great Cien- monastery of the Great Tang’ (Datang-Daciensi-sanzang-fashi-zhuan 大唐大慈恩寺三藏法師傳, T.2053; here abbreviated as ‘Biography’). The chronology and com- positional process of this biography is not entirely clear. Most likely the first five chapters, which include Xuanzang’s youth and his travel to and stay in India, were written by Huili first and then complemented by another five chapters, covering the period from Xuanzang’s return to China to his death, written by Yancong, who also expanded on and revised Huili’s chapters.47 It is also not entirely clear what the relation is between this biography and that of Daoxuan’s biography, the first draft of which is said to have been written quite some time before Huili’s first version. While some questions remain open, it is nevertheless clear that this biography had the strongest impact on the shaping of the different identities of Xuanzang, not

45 This could be a scribal mistake for 65 – 五十六 instead of六十五 – which would suit 600 as the year of birth and 664 as the year of death, keeping in mind that according to Chinese tradition a person is already one year old when he or she is born. 46 六年卒，時年五十六，歸葬于白鹿原，士女送葬者數萬人。 47 This can be concluded from the style and content of the two halves, e.g. no dates are given in the first five chapters while in the second half, following good Chinese historiographical tradition, dates are given for all episodes which have mainly to do with Xuanzang’s dealing – his correspondence in writing – with the emperor and the court. Many biographies – multiple individualities 927 only in historical East Asia but also in the contemporary world, a point to which I will return in the chapter about functional identities or individualities.

5 Commonalities and differences

The fact that there exist three biographies of Xuanzang is remarkable, but it does not answer the question of why Xuanzang was and is special – was he indeed an extraordinary individual, or was he individualised by his biographers? – to the extent that he not only attracted the attention of his fellow-believers and fellow-countrymen but also led all kinds of after-lives and re-incarnations. To answer this question it will be necessary to look at the ways in which the early biographies, which served as the basis of all later representations of the monk, depict Xuanzang. Is there anything different from the way that other eminent monks were portrayed when they were singled out and memorialised in a biography? To answer this question I would like to look at the way in which an ‘eminent’ monk is defined in the Chinese hagiographical discourse. Huijiao, the compiler of the first Buddhist biographical collection, defines an eminent monk (gaoseng 高僧) as follows: ‘If men of real achievement conceal their brilliance, then they are eminent but not famous; when men of slight virtue happen to be in accord with their times, then they are famous but not eminent’.48 A famous monk (mingseng 名僧) is an ordained Buddhist who represents the moral and religious (from a Buddhist perspective) tenets and standards of his time – he is exemplary and can and should be a model to his fellow-monastics. But such a monk is not outstanding (or eminent). In contrast to a merely famous monk, an eminent monk is exceptional – he is brilliant (guang 光) – but does not propagate himself publicly (qian 潛), a job which is then done by the biographer anyway. Biographical individuality is, as it were, gained by standing out from the crowd in virtue of extraordinary skills, talents and actions. In the case of Xuanzang’s biographies, the extraordinary and exceptional goes beyond the ‘normal’ hagiographical standard. Xuanzang is represented in the biographies as the most eminent (or at least one of the most eminent) monks of his time.

48 T.2059.319a.24f. 若實行潛光，則高而不名。寡德適時，則名而不高。 (all translations from Chinese are my own); for a discussion of this passage see Kieschnick 1997, 4. This is a clearly derogative distinction of Huijiao’s own work from that of his predecessor Baochang’s Mingseng- zhuan (‘Biographies of Famous Monks’). In practice there is a significant overlap between the biographies in the compilations of Baochang and Huijiao. 928 Max Deeg

In Daoxuan’s Xu-gaoseng-zhuan, although in this compilation Xuanzang is in a way in a de-individualizing competition with other hagio-biographies of other monks in the collection displaying similar features as his own (extraordinary degree of learning, adviser of high officials and the emperor, etc.); this is expressed by the sheer length of the Xuanzang’s biography: it comprises almost the complete fourth chapter (or fascicle: juan 卷) of the compilation. Daoxuan categorises him under the heading of ‘translator’ (yijing), thus giving him the same prominent position Huijiao had already assigned to this expertise or skill. In the ‘Biography’, Xuanzang is described in a number of places as carrying out actions or behaving in a way that fundamentally sets him apart from other monks. However, the text also emphasises that he did not see himself as an exceptional person but as someone following in the tradition of earlier eminent monks who had visited the sacred lands of the Buddha in India: ‘[Xuanzang] further said: “Formerly Faxian and Zhiyan and learned men of their time all were able to search for the dharma and bring benefit to the living beings. How can it be allowed that [nobody] follows [their] eminent traces and [their] distinct tradition is cut off? A man of status should be able to follow them!”’49 Xuanzang’s ‘Biography’ demonstrates a freedom of choice, to use one often stressed aspect of individualisation, on his behalf which is lacking in others. It is in this characteristic, I suggest, that we can locate a grade of narrative individualisation which differs from the hagiographical patterns and norms of behaviour in other comparable biographies of the time. This can be seen in the example of the narrative concerning Xuanzang’s departure from China, which reflects the monk’s willingness to act ‘against all odds’. According to the ‘Biography’, Xuan- zang is forbidden by imperial order from leaving China:

Thereupon [Xuanzang] came together with [his] companions, [and they] submitted a petition to the court. [But] it was ordered that [the journey] would not be allowed. Everyone [from the group] gave up the plan, and only the dharma master did not yield. [He] then sincerely prepared [his] lonely journey, keeping in mind the dangers of the road to the West. He therefore tested his mind and [in his imagination] inflicted on himself all kinds of pains human beings [could experience in order to be able] to endure [them] and not falter.50

The right time for the departure, in the eighth month (October) of the year 629, was revealed to Xuanzang by a prophetic dream, which indicated that he would

49 T.2053.222c.6–8 又言：“昔法顯、智嚴亦一時之士，皆能求法導利群生，豈使高跡無追，清風絕後？大丈夫會當繼之。” 50 222c.8–11. 於是結侶陳表。有瞾不許。諸人咸退，唯法師不屈。既方事孤遊，又承西路艱嶮，乃自試其心，以人間眾苦種種調伏，堪任不退。 Many biographies – multiple individualities 929 overcome all obstacles before him.51 And, indeed, there were several unsuccess- ful attempts by officials to hinder the monk as he tried to leave the country.52 In narrative terms, the motif of the dramatic illegal departure53 is taken up again in the fifth chapter of the ‘Biography’, when Xuanzang is residing at the border of the Chinese empire in Khotan after his return from India and before return- ing to the capital. He writes a long apologetic letter or petition (biao 表) to the emperor, justifying his departure from China sixteen years earlier and indirectly asking to be pardoned for his former disobedience and allowed to return.54 Xuan- zang’s request is, of course, granted happily by the emperor, who even sends an escort to bring the monk and his extensive luggage of Buddhist texts and artefacts to Chang’an. This disobeying of an imperial decree or order is, as far as I know, unique and unheard of anywhere else not only in the Buddhist biographical literature but also in other Chinese texts. It would normally have resulted in the death penalty for the offender, a fact of which the biographer was certainly aware. The illegal departure, which frames the whole of the journey to India, thus clearly serves the purpose of demonstrating and flagging up the extraordinary and superior personality of Xuanzang.

51 In his dream, Xuanzang wants to cross the sea and to climb the cosmological Mount Sumeru, and is enabled to do so by stone lotus flowers growing underneath his feet and a wind lifting him to the peak (222c.15–23). This dream is preceded by a dream his mother had when Xuanzang was born: she saw her son clad in white and going westward, and when she asked him what he was up to do he answered that he was searching for the dharma (222c.13–15). 52 223a.6–10. 時國政尚新，疆場未遠，禁約百姓不許出蕃。時李大亮為涼州都督，既奉嚴勅，防禁特切。有人報亮云：“有僧從長安來，欲向西國，不知何意。”亮懼，追法師問來由。法師報云：“欲西求法。”亮聞之，逼還京。 (‘At that time the imperial rule [of the Tang] was still new and the borders not very far yet, and there was a prohibition for common people not allowing them to go to the western barbarians. At that time the governor of Liangzhou, Li Da- liang, imposed the prohibition very consequently since he had received strict imperial orders. Someone informed [Li Da]liang: “There is a monk who has come from Chang’an and wants to go to the western kingdoms, and it is not known for what purpose”. [Li Da]liang became afraid and sent for the dharma master to ask [him] why he came. The dharma master informed [him]: “[I] want to go to the West to search for the dharma”. [When Li Da]liang heard this, [he] sent [him] back to the capital.’) 53 Historically the story is rather unlikely for several reasons, one of them being that there is no legal regulation found in the extensive Tang administrative documents which interdicts those leaving the empire, and another one being the internal contradiction of the text, speaking of an individual petition (biao 表) but of a general imperial prohibition (jinyue 禁約, yanle 嚴勅). 54 251c.12–252a.3.; see especially 251c.18f. 遂以貞觀三年四月，冒越憲章，私往天竺。 (‘Then in the fourth month of the third year of [the era] Zhenguan (629) [I] took the risk to transgress the regulations and privately went to India.’) 930 Max Deeg

6 Functional identities or individualities

Xuanzang has more than one identity in the three original biographies: he is the pious and striving young monk; the outstanding scholar and intellectual; the adventurous and brave traveller; the advisor and teacher of foreign rulers; and, finally, mapping the preceding function to the second half in his life, the trusted kalyāṇamitra, ‘spiritual friend’, of emperor Taizong and advisor of his son and successor Gaozong. These different identities, or rather functions, of the same individual in one biography is structurally more evident in the biographies of Huili and Yancong than in the two others. The ten chapters are equally divided into two halves. The first five are principally concerned with the journey to and the sojourn in India, and depict the monk as a religious-intellectual hero. The second half is very much devoid of action and focuses instead on Xuanzang’s interchange with the emperor and the court, mostly in lengthy letter exchanges between the protagonist and the highest elite of the state. It thereby portrays Xuanzang as a clever monk-politician who is capable of securing imperial support for the Buddhist saṅgha, represented by himself and his entourage of scholar and translator monks. So, already in the earliest biographical layer, we grasp at least two ‘Xuanzangs’ with each representing a specific identity or function. Here I can only briefly introduce some other, later examples of what I consider to be functional identities (or individualities?) of Xuanzang that were constructed in different sources under different conditions and with different intentionalities or for different purposes. I favour the term function (and its derivative vocabulary: functional, functionality, etc.) over others because I think that it best conveys the link between the producer/creator and the consumer/recipient aspects of the biography. My understanding of function here is derived from a practical context (let us say: a screwdriver) but certainly can also be applied to ideas and concepts: something (e.g. a tool or a text/biography) is produced/created by someone with the intention of serving a specific purpose,55 of fulfilling a specific task, and it is only the higher degree of functionality (plausibility) in practice56 (being used or accepted by the user/audience) that proves and guarantees not only the practical applicability (it works!) but also the continuity of use or the appeal to potential users.57 Applied to the example of Xuanzang, such a concept of function allows

55 To us the practical example of the screwdriver: screwing screws into an object. 56 The screwdriver being more effective than, e.g., a coin to fulfil the task. 57 Continuous use of the screwdriver and no need to develop another tool. Many biographies – multiple individualities 931 for an explanation of processes of re-interpretation (appropriation) which do not, however, lead to a fully-fledged and stable institutionalisation.58 Over the centuries and across a variety of contexts, Xuanzang has been (re-) presented in different functions: as a founder of a Buddhist school, as a traveller, teacher, advisor, philosopher, spiritual adventurer, eye-witness, archaeological guide, etc.59 This (re)presentation also found its expression in different media, such as text, relics and in pictorial, theatrical, and cinematic form. Xuanzang was, after a peak of narrative individualisation in the biographical tradition during his lifetime and the decades immediately following his death, functionalised in different ways. Institutionalisation: while the group of translators and exegetes of Yogācāra philosophy that formed around Xuanzang was very short-lived in China, Xuan- zang (Jap. Genjō) became institutionalised, in the common sense of the term, in early medieval Japan in one of the five so-called Nara schools, the Hossō-shū 法相宗, ‘School of the characteristics of the dharmas’.60 This school had its own monastic centres, such as the Kōfukuji 興福寺 and Yakushiji 薬師寺 in Nara and considered Xuanzang to be its main Chinese patriarch. Aestheticisation: after his death, Xuanzang very quickly became the object of pictorial representation. A clear iconography developed (Mair 1984; Wong 2002) which even appears in the latest cinematic presentation of the spiritual adventurer. The very fact that Xuanzang had become institutionalised as a patriarch in Japan led to the artistic representation of his life in the popular medieval genre of the emaki-mono 絵巻物 (‘pictorial scrolls’ of sequences of episodes) on the basis of the ‘Biography’, the Genjō-sanzō-e 玄奘三藏繪 (‘Pictures of the Tripiṭaka[-master] Genjō’) (Minamoto 1962; Wong 2002, 53ff). Literarisation: the popularity and omnipresence of Xuanzang as the paradigmatic eminent monk has transformed him into a literary figure known by every Chinese person, even if he or she is not aware of the underlying historical persona. The version of Xuanzang who appears as the ‘Tripiṭaka dharma-master’ (sanzang-fashi) of the Ming novel Xiyou-ji 西遊記 (‘Journey to the West’) by Wu Cheng’en 吳承恩 (16th cent.)61 is, in a sense, anonymised. The monk’s journey is

58 I am using this in a rather common-sense understanding of ‘institution’ as a form of the con- cretisation or materialisation of an idea or – again – function. I thereby differ slightly from the more open concept of institutionalisation used by the KFG. 59 See Deeg 2012, esp. 91–100. 60 For an overview, see Matsunaga, Matsunaga 1974; Kleine 2011, 67–85; on Xuanzang/Genjō as a patriarch see Wong 2002, 53–59. 61 Complete translations into English are provided by Yu 1977 and Jenner 1984. On the literary interpretation and contextualisation, see several articles by Yu in Yu 2009. 932 Max Deeg completely de-historicised and mythologised in this popular work. Other mighty but comical heroes, such as the monkey Sun Wukong 孫悟空 or the pig Zhu Bajie 豬八戒, are introduced and these reduce Xuanzang to the role of an almost deco- rative figure. The historical process through which this functionalisation of Xuan- zang as (or his transformation into) the protagonist of a secular novel happened is fascinating (Dudbridge 1970) and helps to reveal the different levels of functionalisation that can occur in biographical material. ‘Scientification’62: in the first half of the 19th century, Xuanzang was ‘discovered’ by western scholarship. The focus here was on Xuanzang as an eye witness, a traveller, ethnographer, and geographer, a proto-scholar, as it were, who could help to reconstruct Indian history or the history of Indian Buddhism or help iden- tify archaeological sites in colonial India (Leoshko 2003). In a way, this led to the Indianisation of Xuanzang and the texts affiliated with him. Politicisation: in recent times it has been possible to observe a politicisation of Xuanzang in a range of contexts. He is invocated by the Indian and Chinese government and cultural and intellectual circles as an early witness of Sino- Indian exchange and friendship. This connection reached its first peak with the donation of Xuanzang relics by the Dalai Lama on behalf of the Chinese government to India, represented by Jawarhal Nehru, on the occasion of the celebrations of the 2500th birthday of the Buddha in 1956, and has culminated more recently in the Xi Jinping-Modi move to establish a new phase of Sino-Indian friendship.63 Xuanzang became the main figure for symbolising the Sino-Indian friendship, the ups and downs of which are mapped by the changing fates of the Xuanzang Memorial Hall near the archaeological site of the old Nālandā monastery, started already in 1957 but only completed in 2007.64 In the context of the new economic and cultural master-project of the Chinese government, the ‘One Belt, One Road’ (yidai yilu 一帶一路) initiative, with its strong rhetoric of reviving the Silk Road, Xuanzang is frequently flagged up as a historical paradigmatic antecedent of China’s outreach to the wider world.

62 I use ‘scientification’ in the absence of a better term. 63 See e.g. https://cpianalysis.org/2014/11/21/searching-for-inner-peace-in-sino- indian- relations-xi-and-modis-buddhist-diplomacy/ (accessed 29-05-2017). One of the continuous pro- moters of Xuanzang as the beacon of Sino-Indian friendship and cultural ties was Tan Yun-Shan (Tan Yunshan) 譚雲山 (1898–1983), a Chinese who had lived and taught at Santiniketan and is often dubbed as a modern Xuanzang: see Tan 1999. 64 See https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/exhibit/-gLy1Bey76EHJA (accessed 14-05-2017). Many biographies – multiple individualities 933

7 Conclusion

Religious biographies construct lives between individuality and religious functionality or purpose. How much individuality is given to a protagonist is dependent on the intentional parameters within which the biography is constructed. The construction of religious individuality is, thus, entrenched and restricted in given patterns of religious ideals and concepts, to such an extent that the protagonist is paradoxically de-individualised in the process of biography-making. In the case of Xuanzang, this is evident in the earliest biographical depiction of the monk as, on the one hand, a religious ‘adventurer-hero’ and, on the other, a scholar-monk and advisor of the Chinese emperor in two different phases of his life. His biographers Huili and Yancong portray him as an exceptional and extraordinary individual whose unique life is beyond comparison to others. Indi- viduality is reached by going beyond the usual hagiographic ideals and patterns, and this is achieved by combining identities or functions which are rarely found individually in other monastic biographies and even less encountered together in one individual.65 It would be interesting to explore whether the concept of multiple layers of identity or constructed individuality is also traceable in other cultural contexts of religious autobiography and biography (e.g. Mani, Shōtoku Taishō 聖徳太子, Augustine, Martin Luther, etc.), and how such biographies contributed to and influenced the shaping of ideas of religious individuality. But this is beyond the scope of the present paper and must remain a project for future work.

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[Texts from the Chinese Buddhist canon are quoted according to the electronic version of the Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Association (CBETA), Fagu-shan 法鼓山, Taiwan, of the Taishō print edition (Taishō-shinshū-daizōkyō 大正新脩大蔵經, ed. Watanabe Kaikyoku 渡辺海旭, Takakusu Junjirō 高楠順次郎, Tokyo 1924–1934); this also includes one quote from the Zoku-(or Manji-)daizōkyō (Man-shin-zokuzō 卍新續藏, X). The quotations are given by volume number, page, column (a, b, c) and lines, e.g. T. (or X)]

65 Without theorising it explicitly, a similar approach has been taken by Chen Jinhua (2007) in his monumental ‘intellectual biography’ of the monk Fazang 法藏 (643–712). 934 Max Deeg

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