Tang monk of Sogdian descent who systematised Huayan Buddhism, helped translate the eighty-juan Avatamsaka Sutra, and taught Empress Wu with the image of a golden lion
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.
Fazang, of the Kang family, with the style Xianshou (some say a title from Empress Wu), descended from Sogdians of Kangju whose family had settled in Chang'an in his grandfather's time. At sixteen he went to Mount Taibai to seek the Dharma and later studied the Avatamsaka Sutra under Zhiyan at Yunhua Monastery. In 670 Empress Wu turned her family home into Taiyuan Monastery and had him ordained there, and he went on to lecture on the sutra over thirty times in Chang'an and Luoyang. He worked with Siksananda on the new eighty-juan translation, lectured on it at Fo Shouji Monastery in Luoyang when it was finished in 699, and explained its teaching to the empress by pointing to a golden lion in the palace, the basis of the Treatise on the Golden Lion. He died at Da Jianfu Monastery in Chang'an in 712, aged sixty-nine. His works include the Tanxuan ji commentary, and the Huayan school counts him as its third patriarch after Dushun and Zhiyan.
Lectured on the new Avatamsaka Sutra for Empress Wu
Wu Zhou period
The monk Fazang, styled Xianshou, surnamed Kang, was a man of Kangju. He traveled to Chang'an and was chosen among the learned monks. Lecturing on the new Avatamsaka Sutra for Empress Wu, he reached chapters such as the ten profound gates of Indra's net and the ocean-seal samadhi; when she remained puzzled, he pointed to the golden lion guarding the hall as an analogy and composed the Golden Lion Chapter, after which she grasped its meaning.
Tang