Of the Zhang (張) family of Sixian ward, Jiaxing; born 1487. He never went to the village school, yet his reasoning was mature from childhood. At eighteen something struck him and he asked his parents to let him leave home; they refused, so he sat day and night and would do no work. Three years later he slipped into Tianning monastery as a postulant. He was tonsured at Dongchan under Ang, and it was Ang's dharma-uncle JI'AN ZUO — a son of Motang Xuan — whom he served in earnest. Walking in the cloister one day he heard the chime struck in the Buddha hall and broke open; he went straight to the abbot's room, and Ji'an, seeing him come, laughed and said 'you have been robbed'. 'The thief is taken.' 'Where is the loot?' He shook out his sitting-cloth: 'A mess, a mess.' Ji'an approved him. He was head monk at Jueweng monastery in Chang'an at twenty-eight, and the old masters of Hangzhou could not stand against him in the hall. He was abbot of some twenty houses in turn, among them Anyin at Jinling (from the Jiajing era, at the invitation of the eunuch Zhang Yong) and Tianning at Jiaxing, where he died. He is described as unhurried and courteous, exact in his discipline in the smallest things, sharing every gift equally with the community, never soliciting patronage, and — after the Japanese pirate raids drove soldiers into his hall — living wholly without restraint, laughing, scolding, and unreadable. He died in the autumn of 1560, aged 74, with 52 summers. He counted himself the twenty-sixth generation from Linji. This is the man Yungu Fahui actually studied under.
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