Biographies des Moines Éminents (Kao seng tchouan) de Houei-kiao by Robert ShihReview by: Leon HurvitzJournal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 89, No. 1 (Jan. - Mar., 1969), pp. 223-227Published by: American Oriental SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/598321 .

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Reviews of Books 223

its own right, demonstrate clearly the eclectic nature of the work.

Rickett's Introduction discusses the origin and compilation of the work and its individual chap- ters, early references to it, and editions and com- mentaries. In his discussion of its transmission, he largely follows van der Loon's excellent article "On the Transmission of the Kuan-tzu," T'oung Pao, 41, (1952), pp. 357-393. He argues convinc- ingly that the present book is not a forgery. A "proto Kuan-tzu collection began to take shape about 250 B.C.," connected with the Chi-hsia Academy in the state of Ch'i.

Before each chapter translated, the author dis- cusses title, authorship, date and composition, and also the style, nature and content, for this particular chapter. He has tackled the dating of the chapters well, but it must still be stated that linguistic tests, in particular those based on Karlgren, are still in their infancy. His conclusion that most of the chapters of this repository are of the 3rd Century B.C., with some earlier and some later, is acceptable.

The text is often in a poor condition. Rickett has done what all of us do: follow the best Chinese edition and commentary-in this case the 1956 Kuan-tzu Chi-chiao by Kuo Mo-jo, Wen I-to, Hsfi Wei-yil, and others, which supersedes the 1873 Kuan-tzu Chiao-cheng by Tai Wang-adding one or two minor corrections of our own, and hope that experience and intelligence will suffice. One of

the few scholars who have faced up to this problem of textual correction is Haloun, in particular in his article "Legalist Fragments: Part I: Kuan-tsi 55, and Related Texts," Asia Major, N.S.2, (1951), pp. 85-120. Some of his ideas about reconstruct- ing a proto-text from all the parallel passages are doubtful, but the basic point that a character should only be altered if one can explain how the corruption actually took place is worth empha- sizing. A science of textual correction, following the techniques of western classical scholarship, is needed. It cannot replace the vast knowledge of Ch'ing scholars, such as Wang Nien-sun and Sung I-jang, but one must try to advance beyond the method of ingenious, inspired (or uninspired) guesses. It would, of course, be unfair to expect Rickett to be the first to adopt this partial mora- torium on textual corrections. We should rather thank him for warning us wherever he does so. However, the Kuan-tzu is one of the texts which need this kind of caution more than most.

In their reviews, D. C. Lau, BSOAS, 31, (1968), pp. 175-177, and H. Kdster, Sinologica, 10, (1968), pp. 61-64, have pointed out some errors and weaknesses in translation. But the Kuan-tzu is, in parts, a fearsome text. Let us thank Rickett for what he has achieved, and hope he will soon give us his second volume.

DONALD DANIEL LESLIE

THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

Biographies des Moines tminents (Kao seng tchouan) de Houei-kiao. Traduites et annotdes par ROBERT SHIH, Professeur A l'Universit6 de Louvain. Premiere partie: Biographies des premiers traducteurs. Bibliothbque du Museon, Volume 54. Louvain: UNIVERSITE' DE Lou- VAIN, INSTITUT ORIENTALISTE, 1968.

If the study of Chinese Buddhism is to mean anything in the Occident, it must begin from a historical foundation. "Historical foundation" means many things, of course, not the least of them being a reasoned presentation of basic texts. Of these latter, the first three titles to come to

mind will be Kao seng chuan, Hung ming chi, and Ch'u san tsang chi chi-of which the first and third have an admitted overlap of content. All the more welcome, then, is the apparently initial installment of what will hopefully be an integral translation of the first-named of the above three works. As the translator himself says, "Depuis longtemps les savants occidentaux se servent de cet important ouvrage et en ont traduit certaines biographies, mais personne n'a encore tent6 une traduction int6grale."

In an Introduction of under five pages, the translator says what has to be said about Hui-

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224 Journal of the American Oriental Society, 89.1 (1969)

chiao and his work, while acknowledging his in- debtedness to Mr. Arthur Wright's epoch-making study, Biography and Hagiography, Hui-chiao's Lives of Eminent Monks. Some of M. Shih's ob- servations bear repetition.

Hui-chiao was born in 497 and died in 554, which means that he spent most of his life under the reign of China's most proverbially devout Buddhist monarch, Liang Wu-ti. Born in the com- mandery of K'uai-chi, he took orders at an early age and became attached for virtually the rest of his days to one of China's most famous Buddhist monasteries, the Chia-hsiang-ssu, later to be the home of Chi-tsang, founder of the San-lun school. Here he devoted his life to Buddhist scholarship, his most signal contribution to which was the Kao seng chuan. He left the Chia-hsiang-ssu only in 553, a year before his death, to escape the armies of the rebel Hou Ching, whose uprising was to spell the doom of the Liang dynasty, and died shortly thereafter at PFen-ch'eng, in the present Kiangsi.

The time range of the Ksc is from B.C. 67 to 519 A.D. The work, divided into 14 chiian, con- tains 257 principal biographies, to which are at- tached more than two hundred secondary accounts. Apart from the division into chiian, there is an arrangement by subject-matter into ten sections: (1) i ching ('traducteurs'), (2) i chieh ('ex6getes'), (3) shen i ('thaumaturges'), (4) hsi ch'an ('patri- ciens de la meditation'), (5) ming li ('sp6cialistes de la discipline monastique'), (6) i shen (or wang shen, 'moines qui s'immolerent en sacrifice'), (7) sung ching ('r6citateurs d'Ecriture'), (8) hsing fu ('promoteurs d'actes m6ritoires'), (9) ching shih ('chanteurs-compositeurs d'hymnes'), (10) ch'ang tao ('instructeurs religieux').

Selon l'usage du temps, chacune de ces dix sections se termine par une glose ou conclusion ... ou l'auteur 6met quelques observations ou remarques critiques sur les vies qu'il vient de relater et par un 6loge . .. oui il exalte, en vers, les merites des moines fminents. Dans la postface .... Houei-kiao nous renseigne sur ses intentions, sa methode et ses sources.

What Hui-chiao did, apparently, was to consult every written record, religous or secular, that was available to him, being more skeptical about the

source the closer it was to him in time, the less critical the older, hence more time-hallowed, it was. This is particularly true of the oldest biog- raphies of monks, which the Ksc reproduces virtually without change. Also, the closer in time the personality with whom he was dealing, the more likely he was to consult persons who might have known him. In general, Hui-chiao was a Chinese biographer in a tradition going back to Ssu-ma Ch'ien, but he was more than that: in Mr. Wright's felicitous phrase, he was at once biographer and hagiographer. This means two things. Firstly, there is never any question in the Ksc of the superior capacities, nor even of the miraculous powers, of the men whose lives he retells. Secondly, this is a collection of the biog- raphies of holy men, one in which, as a conse- quence, laymen play only an incidental role. "Houei-kiao ne parle qu'incidemment de ces derniers et, si nous voulons nous renseigner sur leur role exact, force nous est de nous adresser A d'autres ouvrages." Many of his sources, the religious ones in particular, are now lost. Of these latter, the only one that survives in its entirety is the Ch'u san tsang chi chi, mentioned above. Of the Ming seng chuan, only a Japanese anthology of the thirteenth century, the MeisO densh3, has come down to us.

The present work consists of a translation of the first three chiuan, corresponding to the first of the ten sections specified above. It contains all of the early translators, good and bad, great and small The basic text is that of the Taisho shinshu dai- zokyo. "Cette 6dition qui n'est pas exempte de quelques fautes d'impression a le m6rite de sig- naler en note les variantes 6ditions Song, Yuan et Ming, qui fournissent parfois de meilleures legons." The value of the first three chiuan, apart from the biographical information they contain, has been so eloquently stated by M. Shih that perhaps we should let him speak for himself:

Les trois premiers kiuan abondent en renseignements precieux sur les royaumes de l'Inde et de l'Asie Centrale, les voies de communications empruntees par les mission- naires et les pelerins, l'accueil fait par les Chinois aux voyageurs etrangers, les procedes utilises par les traduc- teurs et leurs collaborateurs, l'introduction du bouddhisme en Chine et la faCon dont les Chinois le comprirent.

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Reviews of Books 225

The translation itself is consistently accurate and meticulous. In point of translation this re- viewer found very little with which to disagree. There are, however, some philological matters to which some attention might be devoted.

1) While it is standard to regard Mo-t'eng as a transcription of Matafiga, there is some doubt about it, since the second syllable of the Chinese had a d initial at the time in question. May not Chia-she-mo-t'eng represent KASyapamrdauga, "the drum of Kdsyapa"? Far-fetched, possibly, but t'eng at the time in question began with a d, not a t. Perhaps the question is an idle one, since the man himself is almost certainly an invention out of the whole cloth. (Pp. 1 f.)

2) Fou-jo-to-lo (Puiyatara),-nom qui signifie: Kong-t5-houa ou Fleur de Mdrite. In all likelihood, the name is 0tara, not 0tara, since the former is one name for the jasmine. Is this an oversight or an indication of a knowledge of Sanskrit that is less than it might be? (P. 82)

3) I erh hsi chu tao jen so chii is rendered "Tout cela, vous le savez parfaitement (et je n'en dirai pas davantage)." Does it not rather mean, "The details will be provided by the monk-messenger."? (P. 83)

4) "Des habits, des bols, des lits et des sieges (sendsana) remplissaient trois pieces (de son domicile)." Very well, but senasana is Pali, not Sanskrit. In the latter language, the appropriate form would be sayandsana. (P. 89)

5) Che T'an-wou-kie (?Dharmodgata).-nom qui signifie: Fa-yong ou Issu de la Loi. The interroga- tion mark is not entirely out of place, but there can be virtually no doubt that the reconstruction is correct. While dharmodgata may conceivably mean "issued from the Dharma," fa yung can certainly not mean that. The two do, however, have a meaning in common, viz., "the exalted one (or hero) of the Dharma," which must surely be the meaning intended here. (P. 115)

6) Pa-t'o-lo ch'ien tao Shih tzu kuo chieh ch'uan sung tzu kung is rendered as follows: ". . . et quand Gunabhadra se rendait en divers pays tel que Ceylan, il lui envoyait toujours de l'argent." A footnote makes this comment: "Cette phrase est tres vague. A premiere vue, on pourrait croire que

c'est le pere de Gunabhadra qui lui envoya de 1argent, mais ce passage du MSTT (i.e., the Meis5 denshl) ... semble indiquer que c'est Gun- abhadra qui envoyait de l'argent A son pbre." This interpretation certainly seems to be correct, but it is unlikely that money was involved, in view of the prohibition against the handling of precious metals on the part of Buddhist monks. The likelihood is that G. sent his father other necessaries of life. The question remains where he might have got them, since the monk was sup- posed to accept alms only for immediate use, storing nothing. Theory is theory, however, and practice is practice, and the question remains an open one. (P. 149)

7) A name transcribed A-na-mo-ti is translated Pao-i, which certainly would seem to indicate Ratnamati. Possibly the a was a copyist's error for lo (ancient pronunication approximately luat). (P. 155)

8) A name transcribed "Seng-k'ie-p'o-lo" is tentatively reconstructed as Samghabhara on the strength of the K'ai yiktn shih chiao lu, which translates it as Seng-k'ai or Seng-yang. While this reconstruction will do for the latter, for the former one is inclined to think of Samghavdra.

9) Special comment must be reserved for Kumdrajiva.

In the first place, one reads between the lines of his biography that his father must have been a non-Buddhist, his mother a Buddhist, and that this may have had something to do with the lady's leaving her husband and taking their son with her. For one thing, kumdraijva is a decidedly un-Bud- dhist name, being an alternate designation for the putraMjiva, a plant whose petals are strung on a necklace as protection of the life of a frail child. When he entered the novitiate, and later, when he was ordained, the monastic authorities were clearly reluctant to tamper with the name of a scion of a royal line, in spite of the otherwise universal rule of abandoning one's secular name upon entry into the Buddhist clergy. Even in the clergy the lady (and her son too, no doubt) was treated like royalty, a treatment which in her view hampered the religious life. (P. 62: "Parce que sa mere dtait soeur puinde du roi, les habitants de KuO lui

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226 Journal of the American Oriental Society, 89.1 (1969)

faisaient de nombreux cadeaux. Pour les 6viter, elle emmena Kumdrajiva, et c'est ainsi quia I'age de neuf ans, il franchit l'Indus [Sindhu] a la suite de sa mere et arriva au Cachemire.")

In the second place, what was the name of Kumdrajiva's father? It is given as chiu-mo-yen, which, at face value, restores to something like *ku-ma-yem. Nobel reconstructed Kumarayana, then went on to unsay the reconstruction in a footnote: "Unter BerUcksichtigung der alten Aus- sprache des Zeichens ... als yem kann der Name des Vaters allerdings auch anders gelautet ha- ben." The present translator blandly changes Kumardyana into Kumnrayana with no comment at all. If the third character was omitted through a copyist's error, it might have been Kumdray- aman (of which the nom. s. would be Kumaray- ama), meaning "having the stride of Kumara," i.e., of Karttikeya, son of Siva and Parvati, popularly regarded as a war god. Now what if there was no omission, but the yen of the father's name is an error for something else? May one venture liao (ancient pronunication approxi- mately lieu)? That might give us kumarayu, 'prince'. Cf. p. 81:"... A 1'6tranger, le nom donn6 aux enfants est bas6 sur celui des parents. Le pere de Kumarajiva s'appelait. . ., et le surnom de sa mere etait K'i-p'o (Jiva). C'est pourquoi il 6tait ainsi appel6." If the father's name was Kumdrayu and the mother's Jiva, without much strain they could be combined to form KumAra- jiva.

Pp. 78 f.: "Si je prenais le pinceau pour com- poser un Abhidharma du Mahdyana, cela ne serait pas pour 6galer Katyyaniputra." Fei Chia- chan-yen tzu pi yeh would seem, however, to mean that K. was confident that he would outstrip the authors of the original Abhidharma. For the biographer goes on to say that "sa fiert6 d6passait tous les autres" (ao an ch'u ch'in). One has, in fact, the image of a haughty man who knew that his pride ill became his calling, and who conse- quently felt guilty and tried to assuage his own feelings by a show of modesty, which did not quite come off.

In this section of the Ksc more than in any of the others, the Indic material is very relevant.

One has the impression that M. Shih's Sanskrit is not all that it might be, and that he did not exer- cise adequate care in verifying Sanskrit equiva- lents. For instance, it is not always appropriate to render lun with sdstra, nor is Nanjio's catalogue necessarily the last word where original titles are concerned. There is, in the present work, a fair number of questionable reconstructions, virtually all of which could have been avoided by consulting competent Sprachkenner.

However, lest this welter of comments should mislead, let it be reiterated here and now that the quality of the translation is consistently high. One looks forward, therefore, to the appearance of the remainder, and that right soon.

LEON HURVITZ UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON

GLOSSARY

a3

a na so ti

ao an ch'u ch'in LJ

chfang tao

che t 'an woukie k f J%44J

Obi tsang

chia bsiang ssu

chia she mo ttens A Ti A

cbing abih

cbiu mo yen

ch'u aan tsang chi chi i

chic4

fa o I4 a yung t

fei clia cbanU yen trz pi yeh < Z4i a His % fou Jo to lo

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Reviews of Books 227

hon cbing4oj

houei kiao A2 .

hai ch'an ;

being fa ilkt

hui chiao

hung ming chi ;4

i chieh

i ching

i erh hei chu tao Jen so chii

i shen

kftai yiian aldh chiao u1g t S t

kao sng cbchan

kao seng tchouan 4-2 k'ip'o

kiang t

Icong to houa m

k'tui chi.

liang

liangWu ti

liaoi

lo

lult

neisa denah5 11 4/

ming

aing Iii

ming song chuan ~~~

mo tleng t aio n

pa t to lo ch'ien tao shih tzu kao chieh chfuan sung tzu kng

plen chleng _ 'l.

san lun

aeng k'ai

seng k'ie p'o lo

aeng yang

ahen i

aong f-

mm ma chiien ?7 0

sung cbing

tWais shinshf dai-z5ky3 J i f4(ki~

wang shenL

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