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 life- time 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 (patri- archs, 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

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