Clerics › Religious Figure
Yancong
Early Tang monk of Xuanzang's school who edited and expanded Huili's five-chapter life of Xuanzang into the ten-chapter Biography of the Tripitaka Master of Da Ci'en Monastery.
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.
Also known as Shi Yancong · the monk Yancong
Yancong was an early Tang monk whose family and home are unknown. The Song Biographies of Eminent Monks says he came to the capital at the end of the Zhenguan era to study under Xuanzang and was a gifted writer, versed in both Buddhist and classical learning. Huili had written a five-chapter life of Xuanzang and hidden the draft before he died; when his disciples recovered it, they asked Yancong to arrange it, write a preface and add annotations. The result, in ten chapters with a preface dated 688, is the Biography of the Tripitaka Master of Da Ci'en Monastery, the fullest account of Xuanzang's life and journey to India. Yancong also compiled a collection of documents arguing that monks need not bow to laymen. His death is not recorded.
Life and times
Dates Dates unknown; joined Xuanzang's circle at the end of the Zhenguan era (c. 649); prefaced the Biography of the Tripitaka Master in 688