Tongan Daopi

Who is Tongan Daopi?

Tongan Daopi was a Zen Buddhist monk during the end of the Tang Dynasty and the beginning of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period. Very little is known about him. Traditional biographies record that he was the abbot of Tongan Monastery on Mount Fengchi near modern Nanchang. The earliest source of information on monks of this era is the Zutang ji, which was completed in 952, but it fails to mention Tongan Daopi as a disciple of his supposed teacher Yunju Daoying. The Zutang ji does, however, record someone with the name Tongan asking a question to Yunju Daoying. The scholar Ui Hakuju has written this could likely refer to Tongan Daopi. He is first explicitly mentioned in the Transmission of the Lamp, which was compiled around 1004. However, in that work, it does not mention Tongan Daopi as having any disciples. The commonly accepted version of his lineage holds that Tongan Guanzhi is Tongan Daopi's successor. However, this comes from Huihong's Sengbao zhuan, which was completed in 1119, much longer after Tongan's death than the other works.