Daishitsu Chisen

Daishitsu Chisen (1461–1536) was a Sōtō master of the late-Muromachi and early-Sengoku period who received Dharma transmission from Kinen Horyu and passed it to Kōkei Shōjun, maintaining a thread of the Sōtō lineage through the most turbulent decades of the civil wars era. He lived through the Ōnin War's devastation of Kyoto (1467–1477), the breakdown of Ashikaga authority, and the rise of regional warlords — a period when many Buddhist temples were burned, abandoned, or co-opted into the patronage networks of competing military powers^[1].

In this environment, the preservation of authentic Dharma transmission required not institutional strength but the personal commitment of individual abbots willing to carry the lineage without the support of strong central authority. Daishitsu's generation represents Sōtō at its most dispersed and provincial: no longer anchored to a powerful patron, the school's survival depended on the network of small regional temples whose abbots practiced and transmitted without benefit of Gozan prestige or shogunal sponsorship^[1].