 He was quite precocious in spiritual matters, and became a monk at age seven.When he was young, he studied with Falang (法朗, 507-581) at the Xinghuang Temple () in Nanjing, and studied the three Madhyamaka treatises (The Treatise on the Middle Way, The Treatise on the Twelve Gates, and The One-Hundred-Verse Treatise) which had been translated by Kumarajiva more than a century before, and it is with these texts that he is most often identified.He became the head monk at Xinghuang Temple upon Falang's death in 581.