For religionists, methods of reading religious biographies, as a kind of life writing have three different phases: practical, critical and interpretive. The three phases show us the constructive nature of these writings and their epochal character. Based on this understanding, this essay analyzes the process whereby Liu Sahe became a saint-monk. With three different historicalnarratives, the texts’ religious rhetoric parses and transforms his complicated experience into three religiously meaningful parts of his travel—traveling through hells, visiting sites for penance, and wandering about preaching. Such a practice resembles that of cartography where complex geographical features are converted into limited and controllable references. Investigating various accounts of Liu Sahe’s life by Wang Yan (454?-520), Hui Jiao (497-554) and Dao Xuan (596-667), this essay explores how an illiterate monk in the 4th-5th centuries became a saint and spread miracles, and how the authors intentionally chose the account (ji 記), biographical writing (zhuan 傳), and record (lu 錄) styles to describe and represent his life. This approach moreover involves issues of the communication between the Hu 胡 (foreigners) and the native Han 漢 people in medieval Buddhism, the spread and acceptance of Buddhism in lay and monastic groups, and the intertextuality between the different mediums of ji 記, zhuan 傳, and lu 錄. In fact, only by comparing the three interpretations of Liu Sahe’s life can we see that medieval Buddhism contains various cognitive maps. We are thus also able to analyze the emerging dominants affecting the visions and modes of the descriptions that remap Liu’s life. Finally, we may restore a more complete picture of Liu Sahe’s life.
