Michel Reikū Bovay

Michel Meihō Missen Reikū Bovay (1944–2009) was a Swiss Sōtō Zen monk in the Deshimaru lineage, born in Monthey in the Valais. He began zazen with Taisen Deshimaru in Paris in 1972, was ordained as a monk by him, and became one of Deshimaru's closest Swiss-French disciples — part of the small group who took on the responsibility of holding the European Sōtō community together after the founder's death in 1982^[1].

Bovay's most enduring contribution is on the page. With co-authors Lucien Marchand and Laurent Strim he wrote the 1987 introductory volume Zen (published in the "Bref" series of Éditions du Cerf), one of the very first comprehensive French-language presentations of the tradition's history, doctrine, and practice — a book that introduced an entire generation of French-speaking readers to AZI-style Sōtō. He continued for decades as one of the principal interpreters of Deshimaru's teaching for a Francophone lay audience. From 1995 to 2003 he served as president of the Association Zen Internationale^[2].

Returning to Switzerland in 1985, Bovay re-established his teaching at the Zen Dōjō Zürich — the dōjō originally founded by Deshimaru in 1975 — and from there extended the AZI network across German- and French-speaking Switzerland, training a generation of Swiss practitioners. In 1998 he received dharma transmission (shihō) from Yūkō Okamoto Roshi at Teishōji in Japan. Following a serious illness, in 2007 he handed responsibility for the Zen Dōjō Zürich to his eldest disciple, the Zen nun Eishuku Monika Leibundgut, whom he supported until his death in 2009. In 2022, thirteen years after his death, Éditions Le Relié published Deshimaru: Histoires vécues avec un maître zen — a posthumous collection of his memoirs of life and training under Deshimaru. Through these two books Bovay remains, alongside Pierre Crépon and Évelyne de Smedt, one of the principal first-generation French-language witnesses to Deshimaru's mission^[3].