Baian Hakujun Kuroda

Baian Hakujun Kuroda (黒田白雲, 1898–1978) was a leading mid-twentieth-century Sōtō priest, abbot of Kōshin-ji / Kirigaya-ji in Tokyo and of his family temple in Ōtawara, Tochigi, and the father and Sōtō dharma transmitter of Hakuyū Taizan Maezumi. Within Western Zen he is most often encountered as the 'Hakujun' of 'Baian Hakujun Daiosho,' the dharma name from which the White Plum Asanga (白梅花) — the lineage federation of Maezumi's twelve American heirs — takes its identity^[1].

Kuroda was a working Sōtōshū abbot of the type that anchors mainstream Japanese Sōtō: he raised his family in the precincts of his own temple, sent his sons through both academic study and Sōji-ji training, and in due course transmitted his temple succession to one of them. Maezumi was born in his father's temple in Ōtawara in 1931, and after monastic training at Sōji-ji 'received shihō from his father in 1955, a standard procedure in the Soto-sect, where local temple-propriety is inherited from father to son.' That Sōtō transmission from Hakujun Kuroda — alongside Maezumi's later Rinzai inka from Koryū Osaka and his Harada-Yasutani inka from Hakuun Yasutani — is the formal Sōtō credential the entire White Plum line carries^[2].

Hakujun Kuroda was thus the bridge between the Japanese Sōtōshū establishment and the new American Sōtō scene that would emerge through his son: where Maezumi's other two teachers were themselves reform figures within Japanese Zen, his father represented the conventional, parish-based, ordained-priesthood mainstream of the Sōtō school. When Maezumi founded the Zen Center of Los Angeles in 1967 and began giving Dharma transmission to American students in the 1970s, he chose to name the eventual federation of his heirs after his father: 'the White Plum Asanga was named after Maezumi's father Baian Hakujun Dai-osho.' The name (baika, 'plum blossom') evokes the Sōtō motif of the plum that flowers in cold — an allusion both to Dōgen's Plum Blossoms fascicle of the Shōbōgenzō and to Hakujun's own dharma name — and frames the American lineage explicitly as a continuation of Hakujun's Sōtō line, not as a break from it. Hakujun Kuroda died in 1978; his other Zen-priest sons, including Kōjun Kuroda and Junyū Kuroda, continued the family's Sōtō temple work in Japan, while his son Taizan carried his dharma name forward as the founding ancestor of the American White Plum^[3].