Toward the end of his life,Vinaya Master Dao-xuan (596-667) showed great intrest in miracle stories. This maniferted in a collection of Chinese Buddhist pieces of this genre called the Ji shen-zhou san-bao gan-tong lu the last fascicle of which contains "The Recards of Supernatural Monks Miracles" (Shen-seng gan-tong lu). In the present paper,the author aims at examining the sources of those "Records" through the parallel found in Vinaye Master Qao-shi's encyclopedia Fa-yuan zhu-lin.
An analysis of the sources mentioned in the Fa-yuan zhu-lin parallels to the Shen-seng gan-tong lu leads to the general conclusion that Dao-xuan compiled his miracle stories about "supernatural monks" by collecting relevant stories from Wang Yen's Ming xiang ji and supplemently it with a small number of stories taken from the Gao-seng zhuan. It furthermore results in a number of complex observations concerning the relationship between the Shen-seng gan-tong lu and the Fa-yuan zhu-lin.
Detailed comparative examination of the Fa-yuan zhu-lin fascicles 19,28,31,42 and 17 corroborates the hypothesis that the collection of "supernatural monks" found in the Shen-seng gan-tong lu has evolved gradually over a period of time. Parallel collections in the Fa-yuan zhu-lin,poobabely prepared without the specific intention of compiling a larger collection of "supernatural monks" in the end,might represent in many cases earlier stages in this development. The effort to develop literary collections carried out by Dao-Xuan and Dao-shi appears to have been a many sided and complex one, but the evidence indicates that they worked closely with each other.
An enquiry into the sequence of Ming xiang ji stories (Appendix II) shows even more clearly that they may have had prepared a large set of small groups of miracle stories taken from the Ming xiang ji and the Gao-seng zhuan,and used these groups of stories feely in compiling their respective collections, the Fa-yuan zhu-lin and Shen-seng gan-tong lu.