Ning, who came upon a wardrobe sitting in the grass while out hunting.
When his attendants opened the wardrobe, they discovered a beautiful
young woman whose father had been a government official. Bandits had
accosted her the previous night, two of whom were monks. The monks stole
her from the others and locked her in the wardrobe. The prince had a bear
captured and placed in the wardrobe while he brought the young woman
to the palace and presented her to his younger brother, the emperor.
A report arrived three days later about two monks who had taken a ward-
robe to an inn one night, claiming that their activities were religious. At
night, there were the sounds of struggle, and in the morning, the monks
did not emerge. When the innkeeper checked on them, a bear rushed out,
having already killed the monks.^14
While wandering monks were strongly associated with bandits, a con-
nection we will see again and again, the monastic authorities at large insti-
tutions represented the opposite end of the social hierarchy. Monasteries
were large institutional landowners that often amassed enormous tracts
of land and industrial production facilities, like water mills.^15 Such power-
ful institutions controlled their tenants just like powerful local families,
often treating them in the same domineering and exploitative manner. And
also like local lineages and landlords, they organized their tenants into
defense forces and employed martial artists to train and lead those forces.
The leaders of major monasteries were often themselves members of the
social elite.
The early forms of Buddhism that reached China were heavily dependent
upon literacy, and many of the monks described in Huijiao’s(d. 554 )
Biographies of Eminent Monks(Gaoseng zhuan), Daoxuan’s(d. 667 )
Further Biographies of Eminent Monks (Xu Gaoseng zhuan), and
Zanning’s(d. 1001 )Song Biographies of Eminent Monks(Song Gaoseng
zhuan) were scholar-monks.^16 Literacy and education were markers of high
status in Chinese society, indicating beyond all protests of poverty in a
biography that a monk came from the elite. A new form of Buddhism,
Chan (Zen in Japanese), developed in China some time in thefifth century.
Its introduction was connected to a legendaryfigure, Bodhidharma, who
took up residence at the Shaolin Monastery. The Northern Wei emperor
Xiaowendi (r. 471 – 99 ) established Shaolin for the monk Batuo.^17 Chan
Buddhism argued strongly against any preoccupation with text, something
that Daoxuan and some later Buddhist biographers had some difficulty
accommodating in their histories. It must be pointed out, however, that
Bodhidharma was usually described as a member of the Bramin class from
India, and his early disciples were themselves well educated. The choice to
Monks and Bandits 107