The account of Baozhi is intrinsically interesting, but also reflects the awe accorded to “men of miracles” and their conspicuous role in the Buddhist tradition in China, as in other religious milieus. Baozhi was trained and ordained as a Buddhist monk. He was knowledgeable in the Buddhist sutras, and in traditional scholarship as well, but his fame was due to his being “miraculous and strange.”
He worked miracles for the emperor and offered cryptic auguries to the elite,
speaking in conundrums or poems that events proved to have been prophetic;
his renown even attracted an emissary from Korea. His strangeness was manifest in being able to be in several places at the same time, and in eccentric conduct and manners. Although his head was generally shaved in the Buddhist manner, he often wore a cap or let his hair grow out; although he sometimes dressed in a Buddhist robe, he often was scantily dressed or clothed as a layman. His eating habits were irregular, and his hygienic practices peculiar, yet he did not transgress his religious precepts. According to an anecdote, which is of relatively late fabrication, and reflects the popularizing of stories about Baozhi in the manner of
other, later, “strange” monks:
He was fond of using urine to wash his hair, and someone among the common monks secretly jeered and scoffed. Now Zhi equally knew that many of the monks had not forsaken wine and meat, and that the one who had ridiculed him drank wine and ate pork intestines. Zhi of a sudden said to him, “You scoff at me for using piss to wash my head, but why is it that you eat bags full of shit?”
Baozhi foresaw his own death, and passed away without illness near the end of 514 (one source writes that Baozhi was buried in 506, but this is due to faulty
editing of a local gazetteer). The emperor gave him a sumptuous burial, spending 200,000 cash and founding a temple at his tomb on a hill at the foot of Zhongshan Mountain, just outside the capital in modem Nanjing. This temple, first called the Kaishan Temple and known as Baogong yuan during the Tang, is the most important of the several that Emperor Wu of the Liang had founded in honor of Baozhi.