Hakuun Yasutani
1885 CE–1973 CE · Modern · Shizuoka Prefecture
1885 – March 8, 1973
Hakuun Yasutani (1885–1973) was a Japanese Zen master, trained in the Harada–Yasutani line, who in 1954 founded the independent Sanbō Kyōdan, combining Sōtō practice with Rinzai kōan study and emphasizing direct insight (kenshō). Beginning in 1962 he made teaching visits to the United States, and his lineage—carried by students such as Philip Kapleau (compiler of The Three Pillars of Zen) and Taizan Maezumi—became one of the principal channels of lay Zen practice in the West. His wartime writings also expressed Japanese ultranationalist and, in places, antisemitic views—brought to wider attention by later scholarship and publicly disavowed by the Sanbō Kyōdan leadership—noted here for honesty and balance. He is included as a Japanese teacher decisive for American Zen rather than as an American teacher. He died in 1973.
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Shizuoka Prefecture
What they did here
DOCUMENTED: born in 1885; trained in Sōtō Zen and under Harada Daiun Sogaku, blending Sōtō practice with Rinzai kōan work.
About Shizuoka Prefecture
Shizuoka Prefecture, on the Pacific coast of central Japan, was the birthplace, in 1885, of Hakuun Yasutani, the Zen master who founded the Sanbō Kyōdan lineage blending Sōtō and Rinzai practice and who taught several of the first Western Zen teachers.
The world in their lifetime
Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Hakuun Yasutani’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
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Works
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