Kobun Chino Otogawa

Kōbun Chino Otogawa (乙川 弘文; February 1, 1938 – July 26, 2002) was a Japanese Sōtō priest whose quiet, intuitive teaching seeded a generation of independent California and New Mexico sanghas, and whose private students included the founders of Silicon Valley^[1]. Born into a temple family in Kamo, Niigata Prefecture — his older brother Keibun Otogawa later succeeded their father at the family temple — he completed undergraduate studies at Komazawa University, took a master's degree in Mahayana Buddhism at Kyoto University, and then trained for three years at Eihei-ji^[1]. In 1967, at the invitation of Shunryū Suzuki, he came to California to help establish the new monastic training program at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, where he served as Suzuki's assistant until 1970^[1][2].

After leaving Tassajara, Kōbun founded or led a constellation of small, deliberately non-institutional centers: Haiku Zendo (later Bodhi) in Los Altos, California, beginning in 1970; Hōkō-ji near Taos, New Mexico; and Jikō-ji in the Santa Cruz Mountains, founded in 1983, which remains his principal seat in the West^[1][2]. He taught regularly at Naropa University in Boulder and travelled often to Europe; in his later years he spent extended periods in Switzerland with his student Vanja Palmers at the Felsentor sangha^[1]. Outside formal Zen circles he is best known as the personal Buddhist teacher of Steve Jobs, whom he met in the 1970s; on March 18, 1991, he presided over the marriage of Steve Jobs and Laurene Powell, and Jobs reportedly considered ordaining as a monk under him^[1].

Kōbun published comparatively little — his teaching was overwhelmingly oral — but contributed essays and dharma talks to *One Bird, One Stone: 108 American Zen Stories* (Sean Murphy, Renaissance, 2002) and to the posthumous collection *Embracing Mind: The Zen Talks of Kobun Chino Otogawa* (edited by Judy Cosgrove and Shoryu Bradley, Jikoji, 2016)^[1]. He died on July 26, 2002, at a retreat house in Switzerland, drowning together with his five-year-old daughter Maya in a small pond on the property; he had jumped in to save her^[1]. He gave Dharma transmission to nine successors: Carolyn Atkinson (Santa Cruz), Angie Boissevain (San Jose), Ian Forsberg (Taos), Jean Leyshon (Taos), Tim McCarthy (Kent, Ohio), Martin Mosko (Boulder), Michael Newhall (Jikō-ji, Los Gatos), Vanja Palmers (Lucerne), and Bob Watkins (Taos), whose centers continue to teach in his understated, improvisatory style^[1][3].