Hakuho Genteki

Hakuho Genteki (1594–1670) was an early-Edo Sōtō master who received transmission from Meido Yuton and passed it directly to Gesshū Sōko (1618–1696), the reformer who would launch the *shūtō fukko* — the seventeenth-century restoration of authentic face-to-face Dharma transmission in the Sōtō school. Hakuho thus stands immediately before one of the most consequential reforms in Japanese Zen history, and his role was to preserve the living transmission under conditions that Bodiford characterises as increasingly compromised by the *garanbō* ("temple-family") system, in which abbatial positions were inherited by temple-family members rather than awarded on the basis of genuine Dharma confirmation^[1].

His life and career unfolded under the early Tokugawa *terauke* (temple-registration) system, which stabilised Buddhist institutions administratively but also incentivised the hereditary transmission practices that Gesshū and his student Manzan Dōhaku would later dismantle. That Hakuho transmitted authentically to Gesshū, and that Gesshū recognised the problem and addressed it from within, suggests that at least one strand of the Sōtō line had preserved genuine practice-centred transmission through the critical seventeenth century^[1].