Koichi Shinohara is a professor of McMaster University. 本文作者篠原亨一為麥克馬斯特大學教授。
關鍵詞
Huijiao (Hui-chiao)=慧皎; Biographies of Eminent Monks (Gaoseng zhuan); Arthur Wright; Peter Brown; Tanchao
摘要
In this paper I propose a new direction for the study of Huijiao's Biographies of Eminent Monks. I begin the discussion with some comments on Arthur Wright's influential study Biography and Hagiography: Hui chiao's Lives of Eminent Monks. I take issue with Wright's view on Huijiao's attitude toward miracle stories; according to Wright, Hujiao was less concerned to awe the simple with accounts of miracles than to persuade the nobles and the literati that Buddhism was intellectually respectable and that its clergy had led useful, creative, and well disciplined lives. With this statement Wright imports into the study of medieval Chinese Buddhism the kind of "two-tier model" that Peter Brown saw in the scholarship on the history of Christianity and criticized. I argue that we need to dispense with the broad interpretive framework that Wright uses, namely that there is a religion of the masses that is opposed to a religion of the elite, and that we must question Wright's characterization of that elite culture as disdainful of tales of miracles and the supernatural. At the same time we must turn to a careful and detailed consideration of the actual contents of Huijiao's biographical collection. In fact from a careful reading of the collection and related texts a remarkably different picture of Huijiao's view of miracles and miracle workers begin to emerge. Wright and others relied heavily on Huiiiao's preface in their analysis of the nature of this biographical collection. Calling attention to Huijiao's heavy dependence on Baochang, I suggest that Huijiao's preface may have been a rather tendentious document and that significant gaps may have existed between this preface (including the tenfold scheme of classifying biographies) and the actual content of the work itself. An account of the content of the collection that relies heavily on Huijiao's preface, as is the case with Wright's classic study, needs to be reexamined in the light of studies that focus on individual biographies in the collection rather than the editor's presentation of these biographies. In the second part of this paper, I argue that Peter Brown's functionalist study of "the holy" and "holy men" in late antiquity in the West offers us some useful insights that might lead us to a very different approach to the study of Chinese "Biographies of Eminent Monks." I attempted to illustrate this approach by discussing the biography of Tanchao (419 - 492), which is found in the "meditation masters" section of Huijiao's collection. I attempt a functionalist reading of Tanchao's life here, suggesting that one of its main concerns was the preservation of the order of society. Tanchao mediated between the villagers in this world and the dragons who rule in the other world. The rain miracle story that constitutes the main part of the story told in this biography does not deny the basic structure of dual hierarchies in which the worldly hierarchy is implicitly supported by an other worldly hierarchy. The situation that necessitated Tanchao's intervention was a malfunctioning or disorder of this structure. It was by accident that people disturbed the dragon's residence. When the dragons were infuriated and made an oath to stop the rain, a monk, who was an outsider and had a reputation for extraordinary spiritual power that reached even to the gods, had to be brought in. Only after the monk had succeeded in converting the dragons to Buddhism could the dragons be persuaded to abandon their oath and bring down rain. I suggest further that the story of Tanchao's miraculous feat at Mt. Lingyin, with its emphasis on converting local dragons, could also be read as a story that describes how Buddhism came to be accepted locally in an area that was not very far from the capital.
