Exemplary Lives: Form and Function in Pure Land Sacred Biography

Abstract

As a literature of exemplars, Pure Land sacred biography presents the reader with the ideals of a community as much as the events of individual lives.The models for the religious life advanced in sacred biographies, however, include not only the religious practices of their protagonists, but the discursive practices of their authors, as well.The work of biography, after all, is concerned not only with depicting characters and events, but with configuring both in a meaningful form.Through a comparative reading of ōjōden and myōkōninden, this study explores some of the ways in which changes in literary form encourage different perspectives on the nature of time, causality, and community in the constitution of the religious life.These exemplary orientations to the religious life, I suggest, are a fundamental aspect of the didactic functions of these texts, and thus of their contribution to the history of Pure Land religious imagination.

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