Late-Heian to early-Kamakura-period Japanese Hossō 法相 (Yogācāra / Faxiang) monk and one of the principal figures of the Kamakura-era Buddhist Reformation (kamakura shin-bukkyō 鎌倉新仏教) — though he is conventionally counted with the conservative-reformist faction (with Myōe 明惠 and Eizon 叡尊) rather than with the radical-reformist faction (Hōnen, Shinran, Dōgen, Nichiren). Japanese name Jōkei 貞慶; honorific name Gedatsu Shōnin 解脫上人 (“Master of Liberation”); also called Gedatsu-bō 解脫房 and Kasagi Shōnin 笠置上人 (after his hermitage at Kasagi-dera 笠置寺). Born 1155; died 1213.
He took monastic ordination at the Hossō head temple Kōfuku-ji 興福寺 in Nara and received Yogācāra training in the standard late-Heian Hossō scholarly tradition. After the Genpei War’s destruction of much of Nara (1180), he became a prominent figure in the Kōfuku-ji reconstruction effort. In 1193 he withdrew from Kōfuku-ji to Kasagi-dera in Yamashiro Province, where he established a famously austere mountain-hermitage devotional centre focused on Maitreya and Avalokiteśvara devotion.
His doctrinal-polemical work the Kōfuku-ji sōjō 興福寺奏狀 of 1205 — a memorial submitted to the imperial court — is one of the central documents of the early-Kamakura Buddhist establishment’s response to the rising Pure Land movement of Hōnen 法然 (1133–1212) and was instrumental in the imperial-court’s 1207 partial suppression of Hōnen’s movement (the so-called Kenpō no hōnan 建保の法難).
His doctrinal output spans Hossō Yogācāra, the Lotus, the Heart Sutra, Maitreya devotion, and Avalokiteśvara devotion. His principal preserved Lotus work in the Taishō is KR6d0045 Hokke kaiji shō 法華開示抄 (T2195), a substantial 28-fascicle commentary that is one of the most extensive Japanese Hossō-tradition Lotus exegeses preserved.
He was posthumously canonised within the Hossō tradition as a major patriarch and is venerated at Kasagi-dera and Kōfuku-ji as a principal Kamakura-era Hossō figure. His cult in medieval Japan became significant enough that he is treated alongside the other major Kamakura founders in the standard hagiographical literature.
Source: standard Japanese Kamakura Buddhist biographical sources; Robert E. Morrell, Early Kamakura Buddhism: A Minority Report, Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, 1987 (containing translations of several Jōkei works); James L. Ford, Jōkei and Buddhist Devotion in Early Medieval Japan, New York: Oxford University Press, 2006 (the principal Western-language monograph).