Fenggan

Fenggan
School	Ch'an
Personal
Nationality	Chinese
Born	China
Senior posting
Title	monk poet

Fenggan (simplified Chinese: 丰干; traditional Chinese: 豐干; pinyin: Fēnggān; Wade–Giles: Fengkan; literally: "Big Stick", fl. 9th century) was a Chinese Zen monk-poet lived in the Tang Dynasty, associated with Hanshan and Shide in the famed "Tiantai Trio" (天台三聖).

Legendarily, Feng appeared one day at Guoqing Temple (located by the East China Sea, in the Tiantai mountain range), a 6-foot-tall (1.8 m) monk with an unshaven head, riding a tiger. From then on, he took up residence in the temple behind the library, where he would hull rice and chant sutras.

The few accounts of him record that he became close friends to Hanshan, and was the one who found the orphaned Shide, named him, and brought him to the temple. From these, and other anecdotes, it appears that Feng was the oldest of the three. The circumstances of his death are as murky as his life: the stories in which Feng is any more than a name or foil for Hanshan cease after he healed a local prefect. It has been conjectured that Hanshan's Poem 50 refers to his death:

Very few of Feng's poems survive, but the ones which do are very revealing; the third of the four confirms Feng's relationships with the other members of the Tientai Trio:

The first of the poems appears to confirm the stories of how he was an itinerant monk prior to stopping at Kuoching Temple (and even then he would depart at least once for a pilgrimage to Mount Wutai):

The fourth poem is especially important, since it unmistakably references the challenge the Fifth Patriarch of Zen set his would-be successors ~713 C. E. making it impossible for Feng (and by extension Hanshan and Shide) to predate the 720's, thereby eliminating many other dating possibilities:

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