Late-Táng / late-Tibetan-period Buddhist monastic administrator at Sha-zhou 沙洲 (Dunhuang). Native place and birth date not preserved; died in 869 CE.
He served as Shìmén jiàofǎ 釋門教法 (“Buddhist-Gate Teaching-Dharma master”) and senior Buddhist authority at Dunhuang during the late period of Tibetan rule (the so-called Dàfān 大蕃 era of Sha-zhou, 786–848) and across the institutional transition into the Guīyìjūn 歸義軍 regime established by Zhāng Yìcháo 張議潮 in 848. Hóngbiàn personally embodied the continuity of monastic administration across this Tibetan / Tang transition and was central to the political negotiations that legitimated Zhāng Yìcháo’s restoration of Tang authority over Dunhuang.
His most enduring legacy is the Hóngbiàn yǐngtáng 洪辯影堂 (Hóngbiàn Memorial Hall) — established at the Mògāokū 莫高窟 cave-temple complex shortly after his 869 death, with his portrait-statue preserved within. This memorial-hall is the cave that became known as Cave 17 of the Dunhuang Mògāokū — the famous Library Cave in which thousands of Buddhist manuscripts were sealed in the early eleventh century and rediscovered in 1900 by Wáng Yuánlù 王圓籙. Hóngbiàn’s portrait-statue, removed from Cave 17 in the 1930s, is now exhibited in the museum at the cave-temple site; the Library Cave manuscripts (Stein, Pelliot, Beijing, and other collections) have since become the foundational source-corpus for the modern study of medieval Chinese Buddhism.
The single-juan Dà-fān Shā-zhōu shì-mén jiào-fǎ Hé-shàng Hóng-biàn xiū gōng-dé jì (KR6s0054, T2862) is a Dunhuang dedicatory text commemorating Hóng-biàn’s merit-cultivation activities, particularly his Vaiśravaṇa-cult dedications.
Source: T85n2862 Hóngbiàn xiū gōngdé jì; Lionel Giles, Six Centuries at Tunhuang (London, 1944); standard Dunhuang-studies scholarship.