Myōe ［明恵］ (1173–1232): Also known as Kōben. A priest of the Flower Garland (Kegon) school in Japan. He is the founder of Kōzan-ji temple in Kyoto and is viewed as a restorer of the Flower Garland school. Having lost both parents in 1180, he went to Mount Takao where he studied under Mongaku and Jōkaku, one of Mongaku’s major disciples and Myōe’s uncle. Myōe also received instruction in the Flower Garland doctrines and Esoteric Buddhism from Keiga and Sonjitsu, respectively. In 1188 he was ordained at Tōdai-ji temple and there studied the Flower Garland teachings. In 1195 he went to Mount Shirakami in Kii Province for further training. In 1206 he was granted an estate in Togano’o, Kyoto, by the Retired Emperor Gotoba. He renewed the old temple there and named it Kōzan-ji, establishing it as a temple of the Flower Garland school. Myōe was venerated by the imperial court and by Hōjō Yasutoki, the third regent of the Kamakura shogunate. He wrote more than seventy treatises, among them A Refutation of Erroneous Doctrines, a criticism of the Pure Land doctrines of Hōnen, the founder of the Pure Land (Jōdo) school in Japan.