108 Self-Perception and Identity
tently defines the genealogical genre as an unfailingly, invariably,
and fundamentally Confucian one. Indeed, Wilson points out that
the genre was deployed precisely as an exclusionary measure, as a
way of ruling out of the Confucian tradition many individuals
(Confucians included) who were viewed as unworthy of inclusion
within it. “When Sung Confucians began to speak of the past as a
single lineage of sages who transmitted the Dao, they were doing
two things: specifying the meaning of the Dao and excluding from
Confucian tradition everyone who was not named. Practices of de-
fining the tradition began to change in the Sung, and many Confu-
cians were literally left out.”^67 This exclusionary element makes the
genealogical genre an obvious choice for chroniclers interested in
imposing some sort of systematization, control, and definition on
their communities. Hence the Muslim Chinese literary elite’s use
of a genre associated primarily with Confucian culture was both
logical (in that it provided a readymade literary model with which
to frame their own community in similarly elitist and defined
terms) and interesting (in that Muslim Chinese literati evidently
had no ideological or intellectual problem using a genre that was
not specifically Muslim, or even Chinese Muslim).
Robert Gimello, another scholar concerned with biographical
literatures that would fall under Wilson’s inclusive definition of
the genre (a definition that allows for flexibility within the genre
itself), suggests that such an analysis is only partially correct. He
urges us to see fundamental ways in which the biographical, genea-
logical genre of literature was not in fact strictly part of Confucian
elite culture, and that that culture, and consequently its literatures,
was subject to change from outside influences that adopted the
same literary forms. Writing, for instance, of depictions of the
Buddhist monk Faxiu, Gimello explains that [they] “allow[ed]
Buddhism, precisely in its unflagging role as a critical tradition, to
leave the cloister, so to speak, and take its place in the more public
arena of civilized Chinese discourse.” Nevertheless, even though
Gimello, to a greater degree than Wilson, acknowledges that the
use of such biographical literatures by non-Confucians ultimately
had some effect on Confucian elite literary culture itself, he views
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67. Wilson, Genealogy of the Way, p. 11.