Feng Gan

Also known as Fenggan Chanshi

Fenggan was a monk of Guoqing Monastery on Mount Tiantai whose story comes mainly from the preface to the Hanshan poems attributed to Luqiu Yin and from Zanning's Song gaoseng zhuan, a Song collection of monks' lives, and is largely legend. According to Zanning, he cut his hair level with his brows, wore a cloth robe, answered every question about doctrine with the words "as things come," and once rode into the monastery on a tiger, terrifying the monks. His closest companions were Hanshan and Shide, who worked in the monastery kitchen. The story goes that he cured the new prefect of Taizhou of a headache by spraying him with clean water and told him that Hanshan and Shide were the bodhisattvas Manjusri and Samantabhadra; when the prefect bowed to them, they laughed that Fenggan talked too much and vanished. Later tradition made Fenggan an incarnation of Amitabha, and two poems ascribed to him are printed with the Hanshan collection.