Kubota Ji'un

Kubota Ji'un (久保田 慈雲, 1932–2023) was the third patriarch of Sanbō Zen, leading the lineage from 1989 until 2004 and overseeing its consolidation as an international order in the years following Yamada Kōun's death^[1]. Born in Tokyo in 1932, he began zazen in his teens after the death of an older brother and entered formal practice under Yasutani Hakuun in 1949, continuing under Yamada Kōun from the early 1960s; he completed the full Sanbō Kyōdan kōan curriculum in 1970 and was confirmed as a Zen master (*shōshike*) in 1983^[1][2].

Appointed abbot of San-un Zendō and patriarch of Sanbō Kyōdan upon Yamada Kōun's death on 13 September 1989, Kubota inherited a lineage whose international footprint — Diamond Sangha in the United States and Australia, Maria Kannon Zen Center in Texas, the European Christian-Zen network around Hugo Enomiya-Lassalle and Willigis Jäger — was already global but still organisationally informal^[2]. During his fifteen-year tenure he formalised the rank structure (*zenkyōshi*, *junshike*, *shōshike*), conferred *inka shōmei* on key European heirs (notably Willigis Jäger in 1996), and appointed Gundula Mayer as the first senior European teacher in 2001; he handed leadership to Yamada Kōun's son Yamada Ryōun in 2004^[1][2].

A lay practitioner for his entire teaching career — like his predecessor Yamada Kōun, a businessman in Tokyo rather than an ordained monastic — Kubota embodied the lay-monastic equivalence that defined Sanbō Zen as a teaching house. He died on 5 April 2023^[1].