Hōdō 法幢 (b. 1740 — d. unknown, alive 1769) was a Japanese Edo-period (江戶時代) Buddhist scholar-monk, by self-designation 學一切乘沙門 (“the śramaṇa who studies all vehicles”), surname Sugawara 菅原, native of Mino 美濃 (Nō-shū 濃州). He took the tonsure as a child and studied for some ten years in Kyoto before relocating to Kōyasan 高野山, where in 1763 he completed and signed his sole extant work at the Kongōsanmai Henjō Mitsu-in 金剛三昧遍照密院 of the Kongōbu-ji 金剛峯寺. He was hosted at the Kongōsanmai-in by the abbot Kaiben 快辨, who supplied the preface.
His extant work is the precocious two-fascicle Abhidharma-kośa-bhāṣya jīgǔ 阿毘達磨倶舍論稽古 (KR6l0027, T64n2252), written at age 24 sui (a sui-24 in autumn 1763 = born 1740). The Jīgǔ is the most philologically advanced of the Edo Kusha-gaku 倶舎學 commentaries: Hōdō ignores the Tang sub-commentaries (Puguang 普光, Fabao 法寶, Yuanhui 圓暉) and instead identifies the Āgama and Vinaya loci classici of every scriptural citation in Vasubandhu’s Kośa (KR6l0023), classifying the Āgamas by their school of recitation more than a century before nineteenth-century European philology arrived at the same conclusions. He further argues against the Tang Xuanzang school’s polemical denigration of Paramārtha’s earlier translation.
The block-print edition of the Jīgǔ is dated Meiwa 6 (1769), and Hōdō must have been alive to see his work into print, but no later attestation survives. The DILA Authority A000736 record gives no further information. He is not the homonymous later Higo Pure-Land Shinshū Hōdō purged for iyanjin in 1807. An announced companion work Gǎiguān 改觀 (covering Abhidharma citations) is mentioned in the preface as “still in draft” and is not extant.
Source: T64n2252 internal colophon and preface (lines 2362–2365 of /home/Shared/krp/KR6l/[[KR6l0027]]/[[KR6l0027]].txt); Kaiben’s preface to the Jīgǔ; DILA Authority A000736.