Han Yu, the Tang essayist whom the scholars of the eleventh century took as their model, had called the Buddha a foreigner who knew nothing of a subject's duty to his ruler or a son's to his father. When Mingjiao Qisong settled in Hangzhou in the 1040s, the educated men of the region wrote in Han Yu's plain "ancient style" and took up his contempt for Buddhism along with it; Li Gou, one of the leading scholars of the day, was among them. Qisong, a Chan monk, answered them in their own prose and on their own ground, and his answer is what he is remembered for: that the Buddha and Confucius teach one way.
The charge about fathers touched his own life. In the preface to his treatise on filial piety he recalls that his father, on his deathbed, ordered him into a monastery; Qisong was seven. He was born in 1007 at Tanjin, in Tengzhou in the far south, today's Guangxi, took the tonsure at thirteen, and at nineteen set out to find a teacher. He became the heir of Dongshan Xiaocong, a master in the line of Yunmen Wenyan. His friend Chen Shunyu, who wrote his life in 1075, tells that on his travels he carried an image of Guanyin, the bodhisattva of compassion, on his head, called her name a hundred thousand times a day, and from then on understood the books of the world without studying them.
His central work, the Essays to Assist the Teaching, argues from inside the Confucian classics rather than against them. The five Buddhist precepts, he writes, are the five Confucian virtues under other names. The virtues are the traces left by the rule of the ancient kings; judged by their traces the two teachings differ, but judged by the principle the traces come from they were never different. Filial piety, the duty the critics said monks abandoned, is honoured by every teaching and by Buddhism most; his treatise on it, in twelve chapters, makes the case. He wrote a commentary on the Doctrine of the Mean, one of the Confucian classics, and thirty pieces "Against Han Yu". Chen says the scholars loved the prose, could not answer the reasoning, became Qisong's friends and stopped their attacks.
He fought on a second front, inside Buddhism. Monks of the Tiantai school, the great scholastic tradition, cited an older account in which the line of Indian patriarchs broke off after twenty-four generations; that left the Chan claim to an unbroken transmission from the Buddha without support. Qisong combed the scriptures and set out a line of twenty-eight patriarchs from Mahākāśyapa, the Buddha's disciple, to Bodhidharma, who in Chan tradition brought the teaching to China, each handing it on mind to mind, outside the written word. He carried these histories to the capital. Renzong, the reigning Song emperor, had them entered into the Buddhist canon and gave their author the title Mingjiao, "illuminator of the teaching", which Qisong twice petitioned to decline. The Tiantai exegetes attacked again, and he answered with tens of thousands of words more; Chen admits that even his closest friends wished he could leave the quarrel alone.
He died in 1072 at Lingyin monastery in Hangzhou, the same year as Ouyang Xiu, the leading prose writer of the age and a critic of Buddhism, who had also been born in 1007. His collected prose takes its name from his birthplace, Tanjin wenji (鐔津文集), and the Essays were reprinted in Japan in 1351. Chen reports that the cremation left three of his sense organs unburnt, the tongue among them, and his wooden rosary intact.