Sanghanandi

Saṃghanandi ("Joy of the Saṅgha"), seventeenth patriarch in the Chan list, is named in the *Jǐngdé Chuándēng Lù* as the disciple of Rāhulabhadra and teacher of Saṃghayaśas (Gayashata)^[1]. The traditional narrative describes him as the son of a king who renounced his royal inheritance after a youthful realization of impermanence and entered the saṅgha—a story-pattern that mirrors the Buddha's own renunciation and recurs throughout Indian Buddhist hagiography^[2].

He belongs to the legendary stratum of the late Indian lineage. As Dumoulin observes, the Chan compilers used recurring narrative motifs—royal renunciation, debate-conversion, miraculous recognition—to give the patriarchal sequence rhetorical coherence even where independent biographical material was unavailable^[3].