Fán Zōngshī 樊宗師 (?–824, zì Shàoshù 紹述), hào unrecorded, was active in the Yuánhé / Chángqìng period (catalog meta gives fl. 820; CBDB id 95000 gives 766–824, though the birth date is inferential). He was a jìnshì and held the prefectship of Jiàngzhōu 絳州 in Chángqìng 3 (823), where he composed the famously-obscure Jiàngshǒu jūyuánchí jì (KR4c0063) — the canonical exemplar of his deliberately archaic, semantically opaque gǔwén style. Fán was Hán Yù’s 韓愈 protégé. Hán wrote both his epitaph (Fán Shàoshù mùzhìmíng) and a famous defense of his style (Sòng Fán Shàoshù xù), declaring that Fán’s writing “bì jǐ chū xīn / bù tā fǎng” — must come fresh from his own mind, not borrowed from elsewhere. This HánYù defense is what kept Fán’s tiny surviving corpus in the canon.
Fán’s other surviving piece, the Yuèwáng lóu shī xù, is similar in style and was eventually combined with the Yuánchí jì into a single Qīng commentary edition (Fán Shàoshù jí zhù) by Sūn Zhīlù 孫之騄 of Rénhé.
Principal works in the corpus: the layered Yuán-period commentary edition of Jiàngshǒu jūyuánchí jì KR4c0063, with annotations by Zhào Rénjǔ 趙仁擧, Wú Shīdào 吳師道, and Xǔ Qiān 許謙.