Seihan 清範 (962–999) — Late-Heian Japanese Hossō 法相 (Yogācāra) monk of Kōfuku-ji 興福寺 in Nara, and one of the most celebrated young debaters of the late-Heian Yuima-e 維摩會 tradition. A child prodigy: ordained at Kōfuku-ji in his teens, he served as a Yuima-e lecturer by his early twenties and gained a court-wide reputation for prodigious debate skill. He died young at the age of thirty-eight.
Seihan’s name appears repeatedly in medieval Japanese narrative literature outside the doctrinal canon — most famously in the Konjaku monogatari shū 今昔物語集 (Book 12, Seihan no Hokke kō anecdote) and in Kokan Shiren’s Genkō shakusho 元亨釋書 — as the paradigmatic exemplum of the brilliant young Hossō debater. He is also referenced in the Hokke genki 法華驗記 hagiographical tradition.
His sole substantial Taishō work is Wǔxīn yì lüèjì 五心義略記 (KR6t0014, T71n2318), a two-fascicle abridgment-commentary on the doctrine of the five mental states (wǔxīn 五心) as treated in Zenju’s KR6t0013 Fǎyuàn yìjìng. The work is the principal canonical witness to Seihan’s actual Yogācāra scholarship — as opposed to the hagiographical anecdotes that constitute his more widely-known biography.
DILA Buddhist Person Authority A001094.
Works:
- KR6t0014 Wǔxīn yì lüèjì 五心義略記 (T71n2318), 2 fasc.