Míngjiào 明教
Late-Míng Pure Land monk active in the early-to-mid Wànlì period. Lifedates not preserved with precision; he is identified through the colophons of his work as a monk of Tiānjiè 天界 / Yúnshuǐ 雲水 lineage, working in the Sūzhōu / Hángzhōu region. His major surviving work is the 《西方合論標註》 Xīfāng hélùn biāozhù KR6p0068 (X1165, 10 juǎn) — an extensive interlinear annotation of 袁宏道 Yuán Hóngdào’s Xīfāng hélùn KR6p0057, probably composed in the early seventeenth century, shortly after Yuán Hóngdào’s death in 1610. The annotation supplies doctrinal cross-references, scriptural source-citations, and explanatory paraphrase for the more compressed sections of Yuán’s text, and is the principal early-modern reading apparatus for the Hélùn. Beyond this commentary no substantial biographical record survives.
There may be confusion with other monastic 明教 in the late Míng — notably the Línjì master 明教 in the 袾宏 Yúnqī Zhūhóng circle — but the Biāozhù’s author is generally distinguished as a Tiān-jiè-affiliated Pure Land specialist working on Yuán Hóngdào’s text.