Modern Chinese Buddhist lay scholar of Yogācāra (Wéishí 唯識) thought, the principal Northern-China figure in the early-twentieth-century Wéishí revival. Founder (1927) of the Sānshí xuéhuì 三時學會 (“Society for the Study of the Three Times of the Dharma”) in Beijing, dedicated to the recovery and dissemination of Xuánzàng’s “third-time” Buddhism. Together with Ōuyáng Jìngwú 歐陽竟無 of the Nanjing Zhīnà nèixué yuàn 支那內學院, he constituted the Nán Ōu Běi Hán 南歐北韓 (“Southern Ōu, Northern Hán”) synthesis of modern Chinese Wéishí studies.
His magnum opus is the Yújiā shī dì lùn kējù pī xún jì 瑜伽師地論科句披尋記 — a complete two-part commentary on Xuánzàng’s translation of the Yogācārabhūmi-śāstra (T30n1579), composed continuously through the Japanese occupation of Beijing (Sept 1937 to Jan 1943) and revised until his death. The accompanying preface (KR6v0029) — discovered posthumously by his disciple Dǒng Shàomíng 董紹明 — is his only autobiographical statement and the most authoritative source on his intellectual trajectory.
Distinct from Ōuyáng’s Chéng wéishí lùn-centred reading, Hán placed the Yogācārabhūmi at the centre of the Wéishí tradition; he believed that even the great Cí’ēn 慈恩 commentaries on the Chéng wéishí lùn “do not suffice to glimpse the full functional totality of the Mahāyāna.”