Early-Míng Tiāntāi 天臺 exegetical master and senior monastic administrator. Native of Shàngyú 上虞 in Zhèjiāng. Born 1352; died at Hǎiyìnsì 海印寺 in Beijing in Hóngxī 1 (3rd lunar month of 1425 = 29 March – 26 April 1425), age 74 (sources: Bǔ xù gāosēng zhuàn 補續高僧傳, j. 4).
He served as abbot of two of the most prestigious Tiāntái-lineage seats of the south — Yǎnfúsì 演福寺 and ShàngTiānzhúsì 上天竺寺 in Hángzhōu — and was finally summoned to the early-Míng northern capital as rectifier-of-doctrine at Hǎiyìnsì 海印寺 in Beijing under the Yǒnglè and Hóngxī courts. He held the styles Yīān 一菴, Tuìwēng 退翁, and (in later Tiāntái-lineage citation) Tiānzhúrú 天竺如.
His principal scholarly legacy is the Dà Míng sānzàng fǎshù 大明三藏法數 (KR6s0007, P1615), a fifty-juan imperial-commission Buddhist numerical-list lexicon completed in Yǒnglè 17 (1419). The work — produced under the byline 上天竺前住持沙門一如等奉勑集註 (“former abbot of ShàngTiānzhú, Yīrú and others, by imperial command compiled and annotated”) — became the standard pre-modern Chinese-Buddhist reference for fǎshù (numerical-category Dharma sets) and continues to underlie the corresponding entries in nearly every Chinese, Japanese, and Western Buddhist dictionary.
Source: DILA Buddhist Person Authority A000007; Bǔ xù gāosēng zhuàn 補續高僧傳, j. 4.