Língcāo 靈操
A late-Tang Buddhist scholar-monk, identified in the colophons of his own work as a 講學沙門 (“lecture-and-study śramaṇa”) of Zhà-shuǐ 霅水 (the Tiáo-xī / Zhà-xī river in Hú-zhōu 湖州, modern northern Zhèjiāng). Lifedates not transmitted; the dating bracket is fixed by internal references in the Shì-shì méng-qiú KR6r0156 to events as late as the Dà-lì 大曆 era (766–779) of the Tang, and by the work’s transmission to Japan via the colophon of Dà-sēng-dū 大僧都 Yì-kōng 義空 — a Tang monk who arrived in Japan in the early 9th century at the invitation of Empress Dowager Tachibana no Kachiko 橘嘉智子. Líng-cāo’s floruit is therefore the late 8th to early 9th century, and he is conventionally dated to mid-to-late Tang.
His sole transmitted work is the 《釋氏蒙求》 Shìshì méngqiú (X1623), a Buddhist version of Lǐ Hàn’s 李翰 (fl. ca. 746) secular 《蒙求》 Méngqiú — a primer for monastic novices, in 4-character couplets, summarising the lives and miraculous deeds of eminent Chinese monks drawn from the Gāosēng zhuàn tradition. The work was transmitted in Japan but largely lost in the Chinese tradition, surviving in the Xùzàngjīng only through the recovery of Japanese-preserved manuscripts.