Fenggan


Fenggan was a Chinese Zen monk-poet lived in the Tang Dynasty, associated with Hanshan and Shide in the famed "Tiantai Trio".

Biography

Legendarily, Feng appeared one day at Guoqing Temple, a 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:

Poetry

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 :
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 to predate the 720's, thereby eliminating many other dating possibilities:
It is difficult to judge Feng's poetic oeuvre with only four works to judge by, and only one really poetic. But it appears that his poetry's formal structures were fairly conventional, and in ideas, from a strictly Buddhist perspective; Hanshan, in contrast, often played with rhymes and tones and structure, and very often dropped in Taoist references, to the point where his actual religious orientation is in some doubt. See for example Feng's second poem, which expresses strictly Buddhist ideas: