Yuan and early-Ming master, fifty-third patriarch of Jingshan. Song Lian's stupa inscription opens: 'the master's name was Zhiji, styled Yizhong, a son of the Gu family of Wu county in Suzhou; his father was Maoqing, his mother of the Zhou clan.' He entered the Haiyun cloister as a boy, advancing in the Buddhist books and the Confucian classics together. He went to Jianye and saw Guangzhi Xin at the great Longxiang monastery, who — with the leading literary men of the age — was so struck by his gifts that they vied to praise him. But a fellow-monk rebuked him: 'with talent as sharp as this, do you not think to shoulder the great Dharma, and are content to be a slave to poetry?' He could not answer. He went back to Haiyun with a boulder in his chest, and for more than a month did not close his eyes — until he saw an autumn leaf blow down into the courtyard and suddenly awoke. Unwilling to trust himself without testing, he took his staff to Shuangjing and called on Jizhao Duan — Yuansou Xingduan — who had long marked him as a vessel of the dharma, questioned him, and found him answering as a falcon drops through the autumn sky. He was made attendant, then keeper of the library. He came out at Longjiao in 1342, moved to Puci, was installed at Jingci by the Left Chancellor in 1358, and rose to Jingshan. He died in 1378, aged sixty-eight.
References: DILA Authority A015578 | DILA Authority
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