Keizan Jōkin, also known as Taiso Jōsai Daishi, is considered to be the second great founder of the Sōtō school of Zen in Japan. While Dōgen, as founder of Japanese Sōtō, is known as Highest Patriarch, Keizan is often referred to as Great Patriarch. Keizan and his disciples are credited with beginning the spread of Sōtō Zen throughout Japan, away from the cloistered monastic practice characteristic of Dōgen's Eihei-ji, and towards a more popular religion that appealed to all levels of Japanese society. Keizan founded several temples throughout his lifetime, most notably Yōkō-ji and Daihonzan Sōji-ji. Today Sōji-ji and Eihei-ji stand together as the two principal Sōtō Zen training centers in Japan.
Biography
Youth and Zen-training
Keizan spent the first eight years growing up under the care of his grandmother, Myōchi, who was one of Great Master Dōgen's first supporters on his return from China. Keizan always acknowledged a great debt to this grandmother by dedicating the Kannon shrine at the temple of Yōkō-ji to her memory. Keizan also praised his mother very highly in his autobiography, and even said that his mother's wishes and her constant prayers to Kannon had enabled him to become a monk, receive the Dharma transmission and become one of the Soto Zen Ancestors. His mother had become abbess of a Soto monastery, Jōju-ji and was a teacher in her own right. It seems that his mother had a huge influence both as an example of someone who encouraged the teaching of Buddhism to women and through her emphasis on the power of Kannon, the bodhisattva of compassion. Keizan first became a novitiate at Eihei-ji at the age of 8 under the tutelage of Gikai, and he was formally ordained at age 13 by Koun Ejō. He reached the stage of non-backsliding while training with Jakuen, and received dharma transmission from Tettsū Gikai at the age of 32. All of this was recorded in his autobiography; he was the first Japanese Zen monk to describe his own life.
Sōji-ji
While Keizan is often spoken of as the fourth generationDharma heir of Dōgen; many English sources erroneously assume that Keizan held the abbotship of Eihei-ji but he never did so. The fourth generation abbot of Eihei-ji was Giun, who replaced Gikai after the latter was forced out of Eihei-ji in what is known as the sandai sōron. Keizan did succeed Gikai as the second abbot of Daijō-ji, in present day Kanazawa. However, his major accomplishment which gave rise to his status as "second patriarch" of Sōtō Zen was the founding of Sōji-ji, which soon overshadowed Eihei-ji as the principal Sōtō temple. Sōji-ji eventually became the institutional head of four regional networks with several thousand temples under them. By 1589 the imperial court recognized Sōji-ji as the head temple of the Soto school, above Eihei-ji. The two remained rivals for imperial support but by the time of the Meiji restoration in 1872, they founded a truce, acknowledging this in the form of words that the Sōtō school followed “the maxims of the founding Patriarch, Dōgen, and the aspirations of the late teacher, Keizan.”
Death
Keizan died at Yōkō-ji on the 29th day of the 9th month of 1325, at the age of 58 years. Meiho Sotetsu became Abbot of Yōkō-ji and Gasan Abbot of Sōji-ji. Both lines of the Dharma Transmission remain important in Japanese Sōtō Zen.
Support for training women
Apart from extending the appeal of Sōtō Zen to the rural population, Keizan made efforts to encourage the training of women in Buddhism. Keizan in his autobiography gave much credit to his grandmother and mother. He regarded their support as vital to his own training, and this must have influenced him. His mother, Ekan, founded two temples, Hōō-ji, and Jōju-ji which was founded as a convent, and where she was abbess. Keizan's worship of the bodhisattva Guanyin, who is often represented as a female, stemmed from or was enhanced by his mother's veneration of her. Around 1323 or 1324, he named Myōshō, his cousin, the abbess of Hōō-ji, a Sōtō Zen convent. Following his mother's example of teaching Buddhism to women, Keizan gave the first Sōtō dharma transmission to a nun to his student Ekyū. Keizan had helped Ekyū by giving her copies of Dōgen's writings transcribed into Japanese to make it easier than Chinese for her to follow. Keizan had a nunnery constructed near Yōkō-ji and made sure funds were allocated for its continuing survival. It is believed that five monasteries for female monks were established by Keizan. He also named Sonin, the wife of the original donor of Yōkō-ji, as a Dharma Heir. Keizan claimed that Sonin was the reincarnation of Myōchi, his grandmother.
Writings
Keizan was the author of a number of works including the "Zazen Yōjinki" and, most famously, the Denkōroku "Transmission of the Light", which is a series of fifty-one sermons which details linearly the Sōtō lineage from Gautama Buddha through the Indian Patriarchs, from Bodhidharma and the Chinese Patriarchs, and finally the Japanese patriarchs Dōgen and his immediate successor at Eihei-ji, Ejō.
Legacy
Keidō Chisan Kohō Zenji, Abbot of Sōji-ji in the 1960s, wrote in Sōtō Zen:
