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tired debates about the historicity of reported events. My only reservation is that I believe it is too simple to read hagiographies as always portraying the ideals of their traditions; while they often do that, they may also at times assume certain ideals (that is, assume readers' familiarity with and acceptance of ideals) in order to play off of them. Kieschnick's view that hag iographies portray how monks were ideally supposed to behave leaves him puzzled by accounts of drunken monastics, for example, whereas it seems quite plausible to me that texts' accounts of drinking do not aim to commend it but to do something more complicated.

The "Introduction" states the bare facts concerning the dates of compilation of the three works, the number of figures eulogized in each, the structure of each work, the possible motivations of the hagiographers, the reception of these texts, and the sources from which they were compiled.

There follow three thematic chapters. The first, on asceticism, usefully surveys what the biographies tell us about how Buddhist monks at a Buddhist monastery differentiated themselves from other social groups in their sexual, dietary, and sumptuary practices and, in extreme cases, in self-mutilation and ritual suicide. There is much useful information here on a broad range of actual religious practice, an aspect of Chinese Buddhism too often overlooked in favor of

context less doctrine Kieschnick closes the chapter with a thoughtful section on the meanings and possible reasons for inclusion of the puzzling cases of blatant violation of monastic norms that one finds in these works--Buddhist monks represented as having eaten meat and drunk liquor.

The second chapter, titled "Thaumaturgy," contains long sections on the forms of thaumaturgy evidenced in the hagiographies, on spells (including a subsection on the use of scriptures as spells), and on miracles. Regarding spells, Kieschnick believes it possible to use the hagiographies to trace a process of gradual sinicization in their use over several centuries (84-90). Overall in this chapter, Kieschnick again approaches a tricky subject carefully, and ends up explaining the presence of so many thaumaturgical and miraculous elements in the narratives by reference to "a fascination with the marvelous," a "thirst for the exotic," and a "sense of wonder" (p. 68) shared by monastic and lay readers alike. At bottom, Kieschnick concludes, the message sent by the marvelous elements in the hagiographies was that monks mediate between

of the technical and sectarian works often studied to the exclusion of other sources by modem scholars.

In his brief "Final Reflections." Kieschnick astutely notes that, although the hagiographies enshrine monastic values, they do not do so in pure or unmediated fashion; these texts were also self-consciously fashioned to wage battle in what the author terms an "image-war" between Buddhist and anti-Buddhist writers.

Aside from the rich and colorful content of this book's three main chapters, one of its major contributions is to underline the process of these hagiographic texts' composition--a process on which the work of Koichi

Shinohara has also thrown important light--and to draw what I regard as a correct conclusion from that process. That is, as Kieschnick phrases it upon first introducing the theme, "Very few of the accounts in the Biographies were composed by the compilers of the three collections; most are instead taken directly, word-for-word, or with additions and deletions, from sources available to them".

These were compilations of materials already circulating, perhaps quite widely, in society, materials less formal and much more dispersed--inscriptions, letters, records of various sorts. To be sure, by devices such as the selection of just these materials and not the countless

others that are lost to us (some of which perhaps did not conform to the vision the hagiographers wanted to promote), the editing of the materials once selected, their arrangement and contextualization, and their textual framing, the hagiographers shaped the messages they hoped would be conveyed by these materials.

Nevertheless, these Buddhist texts must all be understood as rooted in widely held expectations and understanding, in oral sources and a variety of written texts already circulating (though these sources themselves were hardly pure, unmediated reports of events--we simply have no such documents), and not as the de novo or ex nihilo creations of the pious minds of three hagiographers working in splendid isolation.

This conception of the nature of the texts is what validates Kieschnick's conclusion that they may be used "to describe generally held, slowly changing conceptions of how monks were supposed to behave" (p. 11, italics mine). I believe that his approach to these hagiographies is essentially correct and quite fruitful; it is one that I, too, employ in a forthcoming translation and study of a fourth-cent ury hagiography often seen as "Daoist."

Finally, while it is mean-spirited to chide an author for not including a topic one would wish to see treated--especially when a book ranges over as vast a field of data as this one does--it is regrettable that Kieschnick does not attend more to images of nuns in comparison to or contrast with portrayals of monks. Here nuns--as depicted, for instance, in Baochang's sixth-century compilation, available in English translation--are mentioned almost exclusively in the discussion of chastity and sexuality.

The book also includes an extensive bibliography and a glossary of Chinese characters.

The Eminent Monk: Buddhist Ideals in Medieval Chinese Hagiography
Journal of the American Oriental Society, COPYRIGHT American Oriental Society & Gale, Cengage Learning

A Buddhist monk dedicates his live to Buddha and to gain enlighten. At certain countries such as Myanmar or Burma and Thailand, Buddhist monks have a high level in the social life in every community. About a Buddhist monk there are many legends and the main reason for a Buddhist monk is to comfort the people in his environ and try to help them in their spiritual life. In many Buddhist countries it is natural to ask a Buddhist monk from the next monastery if there are problems of almost any kind. To become a Buddhist monk and to be one is a usual way of life in many Buddhist countries in particular in Asia where most of the kids move in a   Buddhist monastery for a couple of days novices as a part of their childhood. The Buddhist monastery also function as a social network to integrate kids who lost their parents and have no place to go and at the other end of the lifespan, to take care of the elderly. Becoming a Buddhist monk is not so easy it takes a lot of preparation and suffering Buddhist Monk Buddhist Novices