Baoshou Yanzhao

Baoshou Yanzhao (寶壽延沼, fl. late 9th c.) was a Dharma heir of Linji Yixuan and a senior member of the founding Linji circle alongside Sansheng Huiran and Xinghua Cunjiang^[1]. The lamp records preserve a small but characteristic body of his exchanges, including the celebrated dialogue with Sansheng in which the two visit a barbershop and exchange a paradoxical command that reads as a Linji-style host-and-guest demonstration^[2].

He is one of the founding-generation Linji teachers from whom the school traces its institutional self-image as a community of contemporaries sharpening each other, rather than a strictly teacher-to-student vertical lineage; through his successors the Baoshou sub-line continued into the next century alongside Xinghua's main transmission^[3].