Protection of the Dharma: Daoxuan and Three Types of Hufa in the Continued Biographies of Eminent Monks
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper provides a discussion on the category of hufa 護法 ('protection of the Dharma') in the Xu gaoseng zhuan 續高僧 傳 [Continued Biographies of Eminent Monks], which was compiled by Daoxuan 道宣 (596-667 CE), one of the most influential masters of Buddhist Vinaya (lüshi 律師) in the Tang dynasty (618-907 CE) and the history of Chinese Buddhism.Compared to the previous Buddhist biographies, hufa is a new category added by Daoxuan.In this paper, I discuss three types of hufa: enhancing the saṅgha-emperor relationship, upholding Vinaya, and presenting miraculous responses.While enhancing the saṅgha-state relationship was the primary type of hufa among elite monks against external persecution in the capital city, upholding Vinaya was a way to protect the Dharma from internal decay of the saṅgha, and manifesting miracles was how Buddhists protected the Dharma and proselytized Buddhism in local society.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 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".