A name attached to one of the most distinctive bodies of pre-modern Chinese vernacular Buddhist poetry — the Wáng Fánzhì shī 王梵志詩 corpus — preserved in multiple Dunhuang manuscript witnesses and gathered in the Kanripo at KR6s0055 (T85n2863).
The historical existence of an individual Wáng Fánzhì is itself uncertain. The conventional traditional account, preserved in late-Sòng sources, places him as an early-Táng lay-Buddhist of Líyáng 黎陽 in modern Hénán, miraculously born from a hollow tree-trunk and adopted by a Wáng-family elder. This hagiographical legend is universally regarded as fabulous.
Modern scholarship — inaugurated by Paul Demiéville’s posthumous L’Œuvre de Wang le Zélateur (1982) and brought to standard form by Xiàng Chǔ’s 項楚 Wáng Fánzhì shī jiàozhù (1991) — has established that the corpus attributed to “Wáng Fánzhì” is in fact a multi-author compilation spanning the late 6th to late 9th centuries, gathered under a single conventional name in the late-Táng / Five-Dynasties period. Some of the earliest poems in the corpus may be authentic compositions of an early-Táng lay-Buddhist named Wáng Fánzhì; the larger body is a layered vernacular-Buddhist tradition.
The corpus is one of the principal pre-modern Chinese witnesses to vernacular literary register, addressing themes of impermanence, family conflict, social inequality, illness, poverty, and karmic recompense in plain colloquial Chinese rather than the elevated literary registers of canonical literature. Through the Dunhuang preservation, the corpus has been recovered as a primary source for both the history of Chinese vernacular literature (anticipating the SòngYuán huàběn / pínghuà tradition) and the social history of medieval Chinese Buddhism (the actual concerns of lay-Buddhist practitioners as articulated in their own registers).
Source: KR6s0055 Wáng Fánzhì shī jí (T85n2863); Paul Demiéville, L’Œuvre de Wang le Zélateur (Paris, 1982); Xiàng Chǔ 項楚, Wáng Fánzhì shī jiàozhù (Shànghǎi Gǔjí, 1991); Zhū Fèngyù 朱鳳玉, Wáng Fánzhì shī yánjiū (Táiběi, 1986).