Nanyuan Huiyong

Nanyuan Huiyong (南院慧顒, d. 930) was the Dharma heir of Xinghua Cunjiang and the second-generation transmitter of the Linji house. He taught at Nanyuan Temple in Ruzhou (modern Henan) during the disruptive late-Tang and early Five-Dynasties period, when many Chan communities collapsed; his survival of that era is one of the reasons the Linji line continued at all^[1].

The lamp records and the *Línjì Lù* supplementary materials preserve a small number of Nanyuan's exchanges, several of which use the characteristic Linji "guest and host" framework to test his students' understanding of standpoint and response^[2]. His Dharma heir Fengxue Yanzhao consciously regarded the Linji line as having narrowed almost to extinction in his generation, a perception that gives Nanyuan's transmission its standard place in Linji historiography as the bridge between the founder's circle and the Song-dynasty revival^[3].