Fèi Chángfáng 費長房 (fl. late 6th c.), a native of Chéngdū 成都 in Sìchuān, was a Buddhist monk forcibly laicised during the Northern Zhōu 北周 anti-Buddhist persecution of 574–578 under Emperor Wǔ 武. After the founding of the Suí 隋 dynasty in 581 he was retained as a fānjīng xuéshì 翻經學士 (“translation bureau scholar”), serving as a literary editor in the imperial Buddhist translation establishment.
His monumental work, the Lìdài sānbǎo jì 歷代三寶紀 (KR6r0011) in fifteen juan, was presented to Emperor Wén 文 of the Suí in 597 (Kāihuáng 17). The catalog combines a chronological frame for the entire Sino-Indian Buddhist past with a translator-by-translator bibliographic catalog of all known Chinese translations, plus a classified list of extant works. It became the dominant Buddhist catalog of the early Táng and was the principal source for 智昇’s Kāiyuán shìjiào lù. Modern scholarship has nonetheless found 費長房 to be over-credulous in his translation attributions, especially for the Hàn and early Three Kingdoms periods, and many of the errors propagated through subsequent Chinese Buddhist bibliography ultimately trace to him.
He is not to be confused with the homonymous Hàn-period magician 費長房 mentioned in the Hòu Hànshū; the Buddhist 費長房 has nothing to do with that figure beyond the name.