Semi-legendary monk of Guoqing Monastery on Mount Tiantai, said to ride a tiger, who appears in the tales of the poets Hanshan and Shide
Mural guide
In a temple courtyard at dusk, a great bronze bell hangs at the right and incense smoke rises from a bronze urn; monks in orange robes and plainly dressed visitors walk toward a lamplit hall, lotus flowers bloom in a stone basin, and a gold prayer wheel stands at the left.
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.
According to the Song Biographies of Eminent Monks, the Master Fenggan of Mount Tiantai, whose name is written with two different characters for Feng, wore his hair cut level with his brows and a coarse cloth robe about him, and stood about seven chi tall. Tradition says he once rode a tiger straight in through the Pine Gate, to the alarm of the monks. In the kitchen of Guoqing Temple there were two ascetics, called Hanshanzi and Shide.
Tang