16 Facts About Hakuun Yasutani

Hakuun Yasutani was a Soto priest and the founder of the Sanbo Kyodan, a lay Japanese Zen group.

Ryoko Hakuun Yasutani was born in Japan in Shizuoka Prefecture.

Hakuun Yasutani's family was very poor, and therefore he was adopted by another family.

Hakuun Yasutani began koan-training in 1925, when he was forty, under Harada Daiun Sogaku, a Soto Roshi who had completed a Rinzai koan-curriculum.

Hakuun Yasutani finished his koan study when he was in his early fifties, and received Dharma transmission in the Soto-tradition from Harada in 1943, at age fifty-eight.

Hakuun Yasutani was head of a training-hall for a short time when he was at Zuigan-ji, northern Japan, but gave this up, preferring instead to train lay-practitioners.

Hakuun Yasutani left the Soto-sect, and in 1954, when he was already 69, established Sanbo Kyodan, his own community of Zen practitioners.

Hakuun Yasutani first traveled to United States in 1962 when he was already in his seventies.

Hakuun Yasutani became known through the book The Three Pillars of Zen, published in 1965.

In 1970 upon his retirement Hakuun Yasutani was succeeded as Kancho of the Sanbokyodan sect by Yamada Koun.

The Sanbo Kyodan incorporates much of Soto tradition, as well as Rinzai Koan study, a style Hakuun Yasutani had learned from his teacher Harada Daiun Sogaku.

Hakuun Yasutani placed great emphasis on kensho, initial insight into one's true nature, as a start of real practice:.

Victoria suggests that Hakuun Yasutani was influenced by Nazi propaganda he heard from Karlfried Graf Durckheim during the 1940s.

Hakuun Yasutani has directed attention to Yasutani's Zen Master Dogen and the Shushogi, published in 1943.

Now that we've had the book on Hakuun Yasutani Roshi opened for us, we are presented with a new koan.

Hakuun Yasutani Roshi did foster strongly right-winged and anti-Semitic ideology during as well as after World War II, just as Mr Victoria points out in his book.