Huyền Quang

Huyền Quang (玄光, 1254–1334) was the third and last patriarch of the medieval Trúc Lâm school^[1]. A precocious scholar who placed first in the imperial examinations in 1272, he served the Trần court for two decades before being ordained in middle age and entering the dharma circle around Trần Nhân Tông and Pháp Loa^[1]. After Pháp Loa's death he assumed the patriarchate at age seventy-seven and spent the final four years of his life at Côn Sơn, where his poetry — among the earliest surviving lyric corpus in Vietnamese Buddhist letters — gives the most personal voice to the school's contemplative ideal. With his death the Trúc Lâm patriarchate passed into a long quiescence from which it would be revived only in the twentieth century^[2].