The Discipline and the History Daoxuan Compiled

Daoxuan's reputation rests on two bodies of work that look, at first, like separate careers. The first is technical and legal in character: his commentaries on the Dharmaguptaka vinaya worked through the rules governing ordination, monastic property, communal discipline and the countless procedural questions a functioning monastic community generates, and his Nanshan school's reading of that code became the standard reference across Chinese, and later Korean and Japanese, monastic ordination for centuries afterward. The second is historical and biographical: his Xu Gaoseng Zhuan collected several hundred lives of monks active in the two centuries or so before and during his own, arranged by category of achievement, translator, exegete, meditator, wonder-worker, and remains one of the few narrative windows modern historians have into the texture of Chinese monastic life across that period, since so much else from the era survives only as doctrinal text. The two projects share a single underlying concern: Daoxuan was, in both his legal and his historical writing, occupied with getting the record of correct practice right, whether that record took the form of a rule or the form of a life held up as example. His own position inside the Tang translation bureau, working alongside Xuanzang on the technical task of rendering completed translations into publishable form, gave him direct access to the very generation of monks his history would go on to describe.