Iyoku Choyu

Iyoku Choyu (1416–1502) was a late-Muromachi Sōtō master who received Dharma transmission from Senso Esai and transmitted to Mugai Keigon (1436–1517), carrying the lineage through the catastrophic Ōnin War (1467–1477) and the subsequent decades of widespread civil strife. His long life of eighty-six years — spanning the full arc of the later Muromachi period — meant that he bore witness to both the cultural heights of Ashikaga aesthetic patronage and the violent breakdown of central authority that followed^[1].

It was precisely during this era that the Sōtō provincial temple network proved its resilience: while the great Gozan institutions in Kyoto were damaged or destroyed in the Ōnin conflagrations, rural Sōtō temples were far enough from the capital's power struggles to maintain continuous operation. Bodiford's analysis emphasises that the Sōtō school's social embeddedness in village and small-town communities — its role in funeral ritual, ancestral memorial, and agricultural blessing — insulated it from the disruptions that damaged more courtly Buddhist institutions^[1].