Tianyi Yihuai

Tianyi Yihuai (天衣義懷, 993–1064) was a Yunmen-line Linji master of the Northern Song and a Dharma heir of Xuedou Chongxian who served as abbot of a long sequence of temples — most prominently Cuifeng (翠峰) and Tianyi (天衣) in the Hangzhou region — at the request of the imperial court^[1]. The lamp records describe a teacher with one of the broadest training communities of his generation, sending out a large cohort of Dharma heirs and helping to extend the Yunmen line's reach into Chan-Pure-Land territory in the late eleventh century^[2].

Yihuai is among the figures usually associated with the rise of *shuangxiu* — combined Chan investigation and Pure-Land *nianfo* — within the Yunmen house: his exhortations to his community to "recite the Buddha-name with a single mind" while still pursuing the cases of the masters are cited by later Pure-Land historiographers as one of the bridging influences between Yongming Yanshou's tenth-century synthesis and the mature Song-period dual cultivation^[3].