Kanzan Egen

Kanzan Egen (關山慧玄, 1277–1360) was the Dharma heir of Shūhō Myōchō (Daitō Kokushi) and the founding abbot of Myōshin-ji in Kyoto, established in 1342 at the invitation of the retired Emperor Hanazono^[1]. With his teacher Daitō and grand-teacher Daiō, he completes the Ōtōkan line (Daiō-Daitō-Kanzan, 應燈關) from which essentially all modern Rinzai Zen descends; Myōshin-ji and its branch network came in time to dwarf the older Gozan temples, and the Myōshin-ji line now accounts for the great majority of Rinzai temples in Japan^[2].

Unlike many of his contemporaries Kanzan refused court honours and consciously kept Myōshin-ji out of the Gozan official monastic system, an institutional independence that preserved the *Rinka* (forest, in-mountain) discipline of the line as the Gozan temples drifted toward literary and administrative prominence^[3]. His austerity, his refusal of state appointments, and the small size of his original community fixed the Myōshin-ji line's later self-understanding as a "rigorous" branch of Rinzai, in contrast to the more cultured Daitoku-ji and Gozan houses^[4].