Of the Zheng clan of Yanguan (Haining); his father Qiru, his mother of the Lu clan. Born on the seventh day of the tenth month of 1587. A vegetarian from childhood, he entered Xingshan monastery at twelve under Zhouzhou and was tonsured at seventeen. Troubled by birth-and-death, he went to the old man Wuhuan at Chexi for instruction in practice, then attended Nanming Huiguang at Jingshan. Reading the Brahma-Heaven Sutra he had an insight and offered a verse; Nanming rebuked him, and he stopped writing verses. In the autumn of 1620, Nanming, gravely ill, put Xiangyan's verse to him; twice he moved to open his mouth and twice Nanming shouted him down, and when he nodded, Nanming handed him the transmission verse: 'A dharma neither given nor received, a mind neither given nor received; given to the handless one, it snaps the sinews of empty space.' He held Puming at Yunfeng in Fujian and died on the eleventh day of the tenth month of 1642, aged 56, in his thirty-ninth year as a monk.
References: DILA Authority A010708
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