John S. Strong

Speaking of Monks: Religious Biography in India and China . By Phyllis Granoff and Koichi Shinohara. Oakville, Ont.: Mosaic Press, 1992. viii, 232 pp.

The two essays in this volume explore how monks in medieval India and China wrote about themselves with their fellow monks. The author translates and discusses biographies and autobiographies of two Jain monks, who lives in the 11th and 14th century CE. The book tells us how a community of Chinese Buddhists viewed the life of the founder of their group, and how his biography reflected the changes that the community underwent. The essays are the result of a joint research project on religious biographies in Asia, carried out with assistance from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.