Shì Jūjiǎn 釋居簡 (1164–1246), zì Jìngsǒu 敬叟, known to contemporaries by his retreat-style name Běijiàn 北磵 (“Northern Ravine”), was a Línjì 臨濟-school Chán master and one of the most cultivated monk-literati of the southern Sòng. He was a son of the Wáng 王 family of Tóngchuān 潼川 (modern Sānyuán in Sìchuān). He trained in Chán in the early Qìngyuán 慶元 era (1195–) and lived for many years at the Běijiàn hermitage in the Tiāntái mountains, declining repeated invitations to take up major abbatial appointments at Tiāntái and at the Yúnjū / Dōnglín monasteries. In the Jiāxī era (1237–1240) he accepted the imperial appointment to head the Jìngcíguāngxiàosì 淨慈光孝寺 at Lín’ān (one of the five great Hángzhōu Chán monasteries), and from there returned to the Běijiàn retreat for his final years.
He was personally acquainted with — and exchanged poems and letters with — much of the JiāDìng generation of literati: Yè Shì 葉適, Zhēn Déxiù 真德秀, Wèi Liǎowēng 魏了翁, the Yuán brothers, and many others. Zhāng Zìmíng 張自明 zì Chéngzǐ 誠子, in the 1217 preface to the Běijiàn jí, records that the friendship between them was first formed during the wěixué 偽學 persecution at the Imperial Academy in 1195. Jūjiǎn’s surviving corpus is one of the most extensive of any Sòng Chán monk: the Běijiàn jí 北磵集 in 10 juàn of prose (KR4d0357), the Běijiàn shījí 北磵詩集 in nine or ten juàn of poetry (transmitted separately), and the Běijiàn héshàng yǔlù 北磵和尚語錄 within the Chán canon. The Sìkù editors compare his prose favorably to that of Qìsōng 契嵩 and Huìhóng 惠洪 (Juéfàn 覺範), the only other Sòng monks with substantial prose collections.