Family ties to Buddhist monks and nuns in medieval China : a biographical and hagiographical study of the Southern Xiao family branch
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The roles of kinship and family ties have recently become recognized as a vital yet unexplored area in the study of medieval Buddhism. This is especially critical in restructuring the relationship between political and religious spheres, which for the Sinologist have always been intricately linked to one another. Although there are studies noting the prominence of family connection in the study of monks and nuns, past studies have focused mainly on the manipulation and modification of religion by political figures for solely secular purposes. Not many studies have turned the tables to analyze the significance of a monk or nun's family background and its intimate influence throughout his or her religious life; nor have they considered how a layman or laywoman's spiritual devotion greatly shapes his or her social life and political career. It is my aim to extend such research and explore on a larger scale the intricate relationship between monastic and lay family members, in this case Xiao Yu, his daughters, sons and relatives, ten in all, from the Southern Xiao family branch during the late Sui to early Tang period. This research serves to prove that the life of a monk or nun, while determined by that individual's vocation and endeavor, is to a degree also conditioned by his or her family background, kinship ties and secular acquaintance. This research, based upon hagiography, epigraphy and relevant materials from canonical and secular sources substantiates the belief that comprehensive study of the monastic order should involve analysis of factors beyond the spiritual sphere.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".