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ISSN 1076-9005
Volume 15, 2008
Review of Buddhist Hagiography in Early Japan: Images of Compassion in the Gyōki Tradition
Buddhist Hagiography in Early Japan: Images of Compassion in the Gyōki Tradition. By Jonathan Morris Augustine. London and New York: Routledge, 2005, vii + 174 pages, ISBN 0-415-32245-6 (cloth), US $170.00.
Religious biographies and hagiographies were dismissed for a long time in Buddhist studies as being too full of the fantastic and miraculous to be any use as historical sources. There is currently, however, a strong interest within wider cultural studies in reading religious hagiography as literature that exposes the socio-political realities of its era, as opposed to simply eulogizing a saint-like figure. Jonathan Morris Augustine’s study of the hagiographical tradition of the eighth century Japanese monk Gyōki, Buddhist Hagiography in Early Japan: Images of Compassion in the Gyōki Tradition, joins a group of excellent recent studies that aim to complicate the usual perception of hagiography.
