As prosperity of Christianity in the western world lead to the biographies of numerous saints, or Biography of the Saint, who contributed to the development of Christianity, and such biographies influenced on the heroic narrative literature in the Early and Middle Ages, as Indian Buddhism proliferated to the eastern world, biographies of monks who contributed to the development of Buddhism, or Biography of Monks, deeply influenced the development of eastern ancient literature. Therefore it is worth to compare between “Gaosengzhuan” which is the oldest anthology of biographies of Chinese revered monks today and “Samgukyusa”, though the latter is not an anthology of biographies of monks in itself, but that includes many biography of monks.
Although dates of writing and locations of appearance of two books are different, there are common elements in descriptive ways, especially among them, Shenyipian of “Gaosengzhuan” and chapter of Shin-ju and Eui-hae of “Samgukyusa” are similar. That is, authors all described biographies of monk in “supernatural description style”. Then what made them to choose that description style? It is because supernatural capabilities of several monks in the initial stage of introduction of Buddhism mainly influenced the introduction and the development of Buddhism. For the proliferation and the development of Buddhism, support of the lord was essentially needed, and thanks to supernatural and miraculous works of monks, they gained trust of the lord, and were able to expand political power and to consolidate position of Buddhism. Especially, there are many supernatural stories of monks who demonstrated supernatural power of themselves in front of high ranking nobles such as emperors or ministers who could influence politics. It seems that they were trying to emphasize political and ideological status of Buddhism in Buddhist monastery. In addition, because there were little literatures on monks in biographies of formal history, they had to use miraculous stories or religious stories as materials in the process of collection of materials, rather than formal history.