Textual Research Of Daoji's Collection And Analysis Of His Buddhist Image

Daoji, commonly known as "Crazy Ji" in local chronicles and "Ji-Gong" by folk, was a legendary Buddhist monk of Linji Sect during the Southern Song Dynasty in China. Stories about Ji Gong has been spread for eight hundred years to this day. There are lots of complex document in different forms of literature. Focusing on Buddhism classics,temple gazetteer and local chronicles, this paper Collects and reorganizes, analysis and summaries relevant document in the history of Buddhism and local gazetteer in order to accurately describe the true face of Daoji monk in history. The value of this paper lies in the following three aspects. First, by collecting and reorganizing the Southern Historical data, this paper carries out a detail research about Daoji's authenticity in history. Second, the innovation of this paper is sorting out a more reliable new collection of Daoji, by differentiating and identifying Daoji's collection in Buddhism classics and local chronicles in the Song and Yuan dynasties, Buddhism classics and Temple gazetteer in the Ming and Qing dynasties. The last, through historical interpretation, this paper describes the long process of gradually reorganization and acceptance of Daoji by the orthodox Buddhist. His character development from scattered monk to Santa to arhat was just a result of the monks fighting for folk belief power and exchanging integration with it.