Songshan Puji

Songshan Puji (嵩山普寂, 651–739) was the principal Dharma heir of Yuquan Shenxiu and the most prominent representative of the Northern School in the first half of the eighth century^[1]. He taught at Songyang-si on Mount Song (the central sacred mountain) and at the imperial capitals; like his teacher he received successive court honours, including the title *guóshī*, and his community was probably the most institutionally well-established Chan community of his generation before the rise of Heze Shenhui's polemic^[2].

After Shenhui's 732 attack at Huatai targeted Puji directly as the inheritor of an allegedly "gradual" line, Puji and the Northern School were progressively marginalised in subsequent Chan historiography. McRae's *Northern School and the Formation of Early Ch'an Buddhism* and Yampolsky's introduction to the *Platform Sūtra* both argue that the surviving (largely Dunhuang) Northern-School texts show a more sophisticated teaching than the polemical caricature and that Puji's eclipse was as much institutional as doctrinal^[3].