Ian Chisatsu

Ian Chisatsu (1514–1587) was a sixteenth-century Rinzai master in the Myōshin-ji line of the Ōtōkan stream, receiving Dharma transmission from Kōhō Genkun and transmitting to Tōzen Sōshin (1532–1602). He lived through the entire arc of the Sengoku period — the era of warring states that consumed most of the sixteenth century — and practiced through the successive attempts at national unification under Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi^[1].

For Myōshin-ji's transmission line, the Sengoku decades were a time of both vulnerability and opportunity: the temple had been destroyed in the Ōnin War and slowly rebuilt, and masters like Ian Chisatsu operated in an institutional environment that depended heavily on the patronage of regional warlords. The *Rinka* (forest, in-mountain) identity that Kanzan Egen had established for Myōshin-ji — an institutional distance from court culture and official religion — gave the line a certain resilience in this turbulent era, even as individual abbots navigated the competing demands of military patrons. The chain from Ian Chisatsu through Tōzen Sōshin to Yōzan Keiyō to Gudō Tōshoku reached the figure who would comprehensively revive Myōshin-ji in the early Edo period^[1].