Shi Daoxuan (596-667) inherited the tradition of self-consciousness and stylistic diversity in Tang Dynasty biographies, and often interspersed his life experience, emotion and thoughts into the prefaces and postscripts of his Buddhist precepts works. However, he did not write an autobiography in the Continued Biography of Eminent Monks, not even in the preface to the work. Instead, we find details about him only in numerous other biographies in the book, where narratives about ＂I＂ sporadically and implicitly told stories about himself. This paper proves that this narrative discourse is different from those in the various Daoxuan biographies of the Song Dynasty or the prefaces and postscripts of Daoxuan's Buddhist precepts works, most of which use the single voice of self-writing. Daoxuan is not only the ＂writer＂ in the Continued Biography of Eminent Monks, but also ＂performer＂ of many roles, such as a student, a partner in learning, a latecomer and so on. The different yet co-existing tones and shades can be regarded as Daoxuan's self-descriptions of his itinerant practice at fifty before the 19th year of Zhenguan, and an autobiographical memory. The paper studies the hidden messages in Daoxuan's self-narration, including dominant factors, historical conditions, and religiosity, to gain an understanding of him and his times and reveal the significance of the relationship between religion and society in the Tang Dynasty. In other words, by closely examining the uniformity of Daoxuan's personal narrative and exploring his patriarchal lineage on the Buddhist precepts, we find that these retrospective discourses are shrouded by the urgent desire in the Buddhist community to revive Buddhism in the aftermath of the Buddhist eschatology of the Northern Dynasty and Sui Dynasty. Daoxuan reflected on the conflicting doctrines of Buddhist precepts in the teaching of multiple others, such as preceptors in the Jin and Bing prefectures, as well as in the capital of Ye, to deepen his own grasp of Buddhist precepts. On the other hand, by engaging in positive and negative dialectical dialogues between his own understanding and what he learned from practitioner Hui Yun (564-637), the ordained master Zhi Shou (567-635), and even masters Hui Xiu (548-645) and Tan Rong (556-640), whom he personally met, he proposed examples to illustrate Buddhist precepts that can be followed. These show the paradigm of ＂I am such.＂ Furthermore, they prompt the readers to understand that many monks at the time, including himself, were eager to demonstrate the tenet of ＂that is exactly how we are,＂ which promotes religious practice within the boundary of Buddhist precepts.
