Bárbara Kōsen Richaudeau

Bárbara Kōsen Richaudeau (born 7 June 1951)^[1] is a French-Spanish Sōtō Zen nun in the Deshimaru lineage and the founder of the Templo Shōrin-ji at the foot of the Sierra de Gredos in the La Vera region of Spain^[1]. She studied sculpture, clay-modelling, and history and archaeology at the Sorbonne in the years following May 1968^[1]. An informal exchange during a faculty strike led her to meet Taisen Deshimaru, from whom she received the Zen-nun ordination in 1975^[1], and she remained his student until his death in 1982^[1].

In September 1993, Stéphane Kōsen Thibaut conferred shihō on her — together with André Ryūjō Meissner and Édouard Shinryū Bacgrabski — "in the name of Master Deshimaru", per the official Kōsen Sangha shihō roster^[2]. The transmission formalised her place as one of the first three of Deshimaru's direct disciples to receive the dharma succession via Thibaut^[2].

In 2001 she founded the Templo Shōrin-ji "under the crags of Gredos in the region of La Vera"^[1], a residential temple where she has continued to lead sesshin and the daily practice of shikantaza. She is regularly invited as a sesshin teacher within the wider Kosen-Sangha network and is publicly identified by other dōjōs in the network — for example the Zen Dōjō Amsterdam — as a direct shihō recipient of Maître Kosen^[3].