Rhetorical uses of the exemplary child trope in the Biographies of Eminent Monks and Biographies of Nuns

Abstract

ABSTRACT Chinese hagiographers and historians from the Warring States period onward had a variety of rhetorical tools at their disposal for conveying superlative character, with one of the most ubiquitous being the exemplary child trope. When Chinese Buddhist hagiographers began to memorialise the lives of their renowned forbears (in collections such as the Biographies of Eminent Monks [Gaoseng zhuan] and the Biographies of Nuns [Biqiuni zhuan]), they too had frequent recourse to this rhetorical commonplace. This article explores the ways in which early Chinese Buddhist authors idealised the childhoods of their protagonists, sometimes drawing on traditional Chinese discourses of exemplarity and other times reinterpreting the trope in light of attitudes, characteristics and practices that would have resonated with a Buddhist audience. To account for the sheer volume of these usages, this article also proposes the hypothesis that some were intended to justify the presence of children in monastic communities.