Religion and Biography in China and Tibet

Benjamin Penny

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136113949
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios étnicos

The Chinese and Tibetan traditions value biography as a primary historiographical and literary genre. This volume analyses biographies as texts, taking seriously the literary turn in historical and religious studies and applying some of its insights to an understudied but central corpus of material in Chinese and Tibetan religion.

1

Jiao Xian’s Three Lives

Benjamin Penny

Some time during the second half of the second century CE, a man called Jiao Xian was born in northern China near modern-day Sanmenxia. He seems to have led a quiet and uneventful life made remarkable by his selflessness, rejection of social convention and apparent supernatural powers. He may have lived into his late eighties, or to more than one hundred, or possibly he never died. He is remembered in particular, it would appear, for going out of his way not to be noticed. He had apparently no lasting influence and, as far as we know, quickly ceased to be of interest to those institutions which were responsible for producing what we now regard as historical materials: the court, great families, the organisations of scholarship and those of religion. We only know about him now from a few short biographical accounts and references that have survived, none of which attained the status of a formal biography in a dynastic history. This is not entirely surprising as Jiao seems to have been remembered precisely for living his life outside the expectations of his time.

The China of Jiao’s recorded lifetime was in turmoil: there were local uprisings and empire-wide rebellions, a major dynasty fell and short-lived states were created and subsequently collapsed. These circumstances proved fertile ground for growing long-lasting reputations: some of the great heroes and villains of Chinese history, rendered as story, were active in this period, characters who became the subjects of historical debate, popular drama, religious veneration and novelistic invention. To a large extent, reputations such as these are granted by the institutions of later generations — choices are made as to who should or should not be remembered, commemorated, reinvented, celebrated or vilified. Jiao Xian appears not to have been favoured when these choices were made. In a few generations after his own time, this intriguing figure had been relegated to the backwaters of historical commentary — there remain no written records of him originating from after the second half of the third century.

One biography of Jiao Xian appears in the collection of immortals’ lives called Shenxian zhuan that was put together in the fourth century CE. Two other records survive in Pei Songzhi’s fifth-century commentary to Sanguo zhi, the History of the Three Kingdoms, and there are one or two other references to Jiao in contemporary texts. These different writings are translated in this essay. They constitute different lives of Jiao Xian, not simply judging his conduct differently, but also differing in their assessment of his status of being.

One approach to divergent biographical materials such as these, in particular those concerned with an important religious figure, is to attempt to isolate a core of what is real and verifiable from what is mythic or simply erroneous. These later accretions are sometimes seen as deriving from devout adherents, revisionists or those promulgating sectarian positions. The most well-known of these projects is the “search for the historical Jesus,” the goal of which is to isolate what in the gospels actually represents Jesus’s true words and actions.¹ For scholars involved in discussions of the historical Jesus, the historical Buddha, or the historical Zhang Ling, verifiable data are at a premium. For other scholars the focus is rather on understanding how these differences in the biographies of a particular figure arose, setting aside the question of what is true and what is false.

Interpreting the differences in biographical records is by no means an unusual occupation for scholars of religious history. Biographies of religious figures have been written and rewritten for all kinds of purposes, the most common of which are promoting the interests of a certain cult or school or using the kudos of a famous religious figure to enhance the legitimacy of a dynasty or regime. These rewritings typically take place within an already established world of texts and are subject to the general constraints and possibilities of textual production at that time and place: audience expectation, stylistic convention, the conditions of book production and others. However, in each case, there was, at some stage, some version (or some versions — this process may have been multiple) of that biography in which a remembered life first became a written life. It is precisely this act, this moment of textualization, that is of concern in this essay as the entry into text necessarily means an entry into genre, and, in the case of Jiao Xian, entry into genre meant the constitution of three different Jiao Xians.

The argument of this essay is that the three biographical records of Jiao Xian that have survived constitute fundamentally different lives. These records may represent three independent iterations of a preexisting tradition which arose in commemoration of a local figure who was spiritually noteworthy. If they do, that preexisting tradition has been lost and is unrecoverable. In any case, what is important here is how three distinct generic traditions have organised that life. It is clear from the analysis below that each version of Jiao Xian’s life stresses different things about him and each attempts to make use of his kudos for its own purposes, but this is only to be expected. What is perhaps more interesting is that as memories of an odd but noteworthy man were constituted into three written texts the shape of Jiao’s life, what made him noteworthy, indeed his very status as a being, was powerfully determined by each genre into which his life was written.

The Immortal’s Life

The life of Jiao Xian from Shenxian zhuan — Biographies of Immortals — reads:

Jiao Xian, courtesy name Xiaoran, was a native of Taiyang in Hedong. He was one hundred and seventy. Usually he ate white rocks which he divided up with other people. He heated them until they were like taro and then he ate them.

Each day he went into the mountains to cut firewood to give to other people. He started out at the house at the end of the village and went around each in turn. Then he started again. He carried the firewood and laid it outside people’s doors. If people saw him they spread out a mat and sat with him and set out food. He would sit but he never spoke with anyone. If he did not see anyone when he delivered the firewood, he set it in the doorway himself and then left. It was like this year after year.

When the Wei succeeded [the Han] he was living on the banks of the Yellow River. He built a hut from grass and lived in it alone. He did not roll out bedding but used grass as a mattress and sat on that. His body was filthy, as muddy as a swamp. Sometimes he only had one meal every few days. He did not follow paths when he travelled and he had no social dealings with women. When his clothes wore out he sold firewood and bought old ones to wear. Winter and summer he wore an unlined robe. The prefect Dong Jing went to see him on this account but he refused to speak. This only made Jing consider him more worthy. When a scrub fire came through, his hut caught fire. People came to look for him and they saw him sitting formally in his hut not moving. When the fire had reduced it to ashes Xian arose with great dignity. None of his clothes or possessions were burnt. Then he rebuilt the hut.

Many houses were damaged by a great and unexpected snowfall. Xian’s hut toppled over. People came but could not see where he was. Worried that he might have frozen to death, together they dismantled it to find him. They saw Xian lying fast asleep under the snow; his skin glowed and he was snoring as if he had fallen into a drunken stupor.

People knew of his marvellous powers and were keen to learn the Dao from him. Xian said “I do not have the Dao.” Sometimes he grew older and sometimes younger. It was like this for more than two hundred years. Later he took leave of everybody and no-one knew where he went. Those who consulted him did not receive a word in reply.²

Shenxian zhuan is a collection of biographies of immortals or transcendents that was compiled in the fourth century. These were people who, through various disciplines — alchemical, gymnastic, meditational, sexual, medicinal, dietary — overcame death, some to take up a position in the celestial bureaucracy, some to live in the numinous places on, or under, this earth. The biographies in this collection, and in the tradition of immortals’ biographies in general, tell us little of the details of the techniques aspirants used to attain the exalted state of immortality; rather they served as demonstrations that such a state existed and was indeed attainable. The attraction of these biographies was also partly in their depiction of the marvellous feats that immortals could perform such as flying, being in different places at the same time, healing, resurrection of the dead and what is usually termed transformation. The Shenxian zhuan biographies are part of a generic tradition of biographies of immortals that was extant at least two centuries before it was compiled and which continued for centuries afterwards.³ The religious tradition from which the biographies came is conveniently labelled Daoist, though this designation is by no means an unproblematic one for Ge Hong (283–343) who is traditionally identified as the editor of Shenxian zhuan.⁴

In many ways the biography of Jiao Xian is a typical example of an immortal’s life. Jiao is introduced in traditional Chinese biographical style with his courtesy name and place of origin. He is credited with an astonishing age — 170 — and his bizarre diet is noted,⁵ in this case eating white rocks that are cooked to be like taro. These three pieces of information, and how they are presented, form the core of Jiao’s biography. While the mode of identification used here is standard across all Chinese biography, secular as well as sacred, what is notable in this case is the absence of any other detail; Jiao’s ancestry, education, any early signs of promise receive no attention and the biography provides no sense of a career or a development over time. Nor do we find other events in the biography located on specific days or in specific years — in the remainder of the biography there is a reference to only one date, the succession of the Wei dynasty in 220. Jiao is granted an age but no date or time of birth is given. In other words, the events in the biography are not located in time in the traditional Chinese way — a nominated year in a particular reign period of a certain emperor, or with a designation from the sixty year cycle. Thus, Jiao’s life makes no reference to the measurement of time in days and years, it does not acknowledge the calendrical system of the court nor does it conform to the expected shape of a noteworthy career. These features place Jiao apart from his society, and his diet of white rocks not only reinforces that autonomy but it also directs the reader’s attention to Jiao’s body and its strangeness which will form a major theme of the life.

Jiao Xian dwelt on the edges of society where many others who followed this path also had, either literally or metaphorically. Each day, “year after year,” he cut firewood for everyone in the village only accepting food when it was offered and refusing to speak. This selfless performance of good deeds and refusal of personal interaction amounts to a rejection of the standards of normal behaviour. But the interest of the biographer in detailing the mundaneness of Jiao’s rounds reflects a preoccupation with how Jiao lived his days, hour by hour. A similar sense of fine observation is apparent in the descriptions of his flimsy grass shelter, his grass mattress, his dirtiness, his eating very little, his lack of social interaction and his apparent imperviousness to cold. These are the things that are important in an immortal’s life, that constitute and underpin the narrative. This history of Jiao Xian is, in important ways, the history of his body.⁶

In this record Dong Jing, the local prefect, (who will appear in the other biographies under discussion here) pays Jiao attention because of the particularity of his disciplines but Jiao disregards him.⁷ Jiao did not so much rebel against government and its functionaries as pay them no heed. The bureaucracy here has no role in Jiao’s life, its function in the narrative is simply to highlight his distinctiveness, respecting him but also revealing a fundamental lack of understanding of Jiao’s nature. In this way, Dong Jing ty...