Menzan Zuihō

Menzan Zuihō (1683–1769) was the most important Sōtō Zen scholar-monk of the Tokugawa period and the figure most responsible for the recovery and dissemination of Dōgen's original teachings after centuries of neglect. By the seventeenth century, the Sōtō school had drifted considerably from its founder's vision, incorporating folk religious practices, secret transmission rituals, and institutional corruptions that bore little resemblance to Dōgen's rigorously philosophical approach to Zen. Menzan devoted his life to reversing this drift through meticulous textual scholarship and institutional reform.

Menzan's prodigious scholarly output included commentaries on virtually every major work by Dōgen, careful collation and editing of variant manuscripts of the Shōbōgenzō, and historical studies of Sōtō lineage and institutional development. He also wrote extensively on monastic regulations, seeking to restore the practices that Dōgen had established at Eihei-ji. His insistence on returning to Dōgen's original texts as the authoritative standard for Sōtō practice was revolutionary in its time and fundamentally reshaped the school. Without Menzan's painstaking editorial and interpretive work, much of what we know about Dōgen's thought would have been lost or distorted. The modern study of Dōgen, both in Japan and the West, rests on foundations that Menzan laid.