Ionuț Koshin Nedelcu

Ionuț Koshin Nedelcu is a Romanian Sōtō Zen monk in the Deshimaru–Zeisler lineage and the abbot of the Mokushōzenji temple in Bucharest, the principal Zen institution in Romania^[1]. The Bucharest dōjō was originally founded in 1993 as the first Eastern European Zen practice centre by Yvon Myōken Bec at the start of his Romanian missionary work — work that Bec had taken over from Étienne Mokushō Zeisler at Zeisler's death in 1990^[1].

In 2006 Nedelcu and the Romanian sangha rebuilt the original Bucharest dōjō, transforming it from a borrowed practice room into a permanent temple under the name Mokushōzenji ("Mokushō Zeisler temple"), whose Romanian and English website (mokushozen.ro) is the public face of the Romanian sangha today^[1]. Ten years later, in 2016, Master Myōken conferred dharma transmission (shihō) on Nedelcu together with Maria Teresa Shōgetsu Avila and László Toryu Kálmán — the three formal continuing successors of the Deshimaru–Zeisler line in the Mokushō Zen House network^[1].

With Vuillemin (Geneva), Avila (Geneva / Ecuador), and Kálmán (Budapest), Nedelcu is one of the four shihō-bearing teachers on whom the post-Bec generation of Mokushō Zen House rests, and the only one whose work is geographically rooted in Romania, where the Zeisler mission first crossed the Iron Curtain in 1991–93^[1].