Clerics › Religious Figure
Zhipan
Southern Song Tiantai monk of Siming who compiled the Fozu tongji, a history of Buddhism in fifty-four juan modelled on the dynastic histories.
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 Hao Dashi · Dashi Zhipan
Zhipan, sobriquet Dashi, was a Southern Song monk of the Shanjia line of the Tiantai school who lived at Fuquan Monastery in Siming (modern Ningbo) and on Yuebo Hill by the East Lake. According to the preface of his Fozu tongji, he began it in 1258 and finished it in 1269 after more than ten years. Its fifty-four juan borrow the form of the official histories, with annals, hereditary houses, biographies, tables and treatises, and trace the transmission of Buddhism from Sakyamuni to the Song with the Tiantai lineage at its centre. He also wrote a six-juan liturgy for the Water and Land Assembly, on which later performances of that rite drew.
Life and times
Dates Dates unknown; compiled the Fozu tongji between 1258 and 1269 under the Southern Song