The two essays in this volume explore how monks in medieval India and China wrote about themselves and their fellow monks. Phyllis Granoff translates and discusses biographies and auto-biographies of two Jain monks who lived in the 11th and 14th centure C.E. Dr. Koichi Shinohara 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 a result of a joint research project on religious biographies.

Koichi Shinohara traces the evolution of Esoteric Buddhist rituals from the simple recitation of spells in the fifth century to complex systems involving image worship, mandala initiation, and visualization practices in the ninth century. He presents an important new reading of a seventh-century Chinese text called the Collected Dharani Sutras, which shows how earlier rituals for specific deities were synthesized into a general Esoteric initiation ceremony and how, for the first time, the notion of an Esoteric Buddhist pantheon emerged.

In the Collected Dharani Sutras,...