Zongmi

Zongmi was born in 780 in Sichuan, and received a Confucian education in preparation for the civil service. In 804 he met the Chan master Daoyuan, of the lineage of Shenhui, and became a monk. Soon afterwards, reading the Sūtra of Perfect Enlightenment, he had an awakening that shaped his life’s work.

He later studied with Chengguan, the fourth patriarch of Huayan, and came to be honoured both as the fifth Huayan patriarch and as a master in the Chan lineage. He spent many years at the Caotang temple on Mount Zhongnan near the capital, where he wrote commentaries on the Sūtra of Perfect Enlightenment, a great collection of Chan writings of which only the preface survives, and the Inquiry into the Origin of Humanity.

In 835 he was arrested for sheltering an official who had plotted against the palace eunuchs, and narrowly escaped execution. He died in 841, four years before the persecution that devastated Chinese Buddhism. His work, which surveyed and ranked the Chan schools of his day and joined them to the teachings of the scriptures, became a major source for the history of Chan and strongly influenced the Korean master Chinul.