Morinaga Soko

Sōkō Morinaga (盛永宗興, 2 August 1925 – 12 June 1995) was a Japanese Rinzai Zen master, abbot of Daishū-in in the Myōshin-ji / Ryōan-ji complex in Kyoto, and one of the principal twentieth-century bridges of Daitoku-ji Rinzai to the West^[1]. Born in Uozu in Toyama Prefecture as the eldest son of a farming family, he was drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army in early 1945 at the age of nineteen; the war ended before he was deployed, but the dislocation of those final months — losing both parents and finding himself without home or vocation — provided the autobiographical frame for the English-language memoir he would later dictate as *Novice to Master*^[2].

In 1948–1949 he came to Daishū-in and was ordained as a monk by **Gotō Zuigan**, then chief abbot of Daitoku-ji, who sent him into the Daitoku-ji sōdō to train under his senior dharma heir **Oda Sessō**; Morinaga remained there until 1963, when Oda conferred **inka shōmei** on him and confirmed him as a teacher in the line^[1]. He returned to Daishū-in as abbot and held that post until his death.

From 1986 to 1994 he served as **president of Hanazono University**, the Rinzai-affiliated institution in Kyoto where his teacher Zuigan had also presided — an institutional role that placed him at the centre of Rinzai monastic education in the late twentieth century^[1].

In parallel he became a familiar figure in English-speaking Zen circles through his long relationship with **The Buddhist Society** in London under Christmas Humphreys: when Humphreys' St John's Wood house was bequeathed to the Society on his death in 1983, Morinaga travelled to London the following year to consecrate it as the Rinzai training hermitage **Shōbō-an**, and on the same 1984 trip presided at Chithurst over the ordination of Irmgard Schloegl as the Rinzai nun Myōkyō-ni^[3]. In 1994 — the last year of his life — he co-founded **Daishu-in West**, a residential Rinzai monastery in Garberville, California, with the ordained American teacher Shaku Daijō and the German practitioner Ursula Jarand, formally extending the Daishū-in line to North America^[4].

Morinaga died at Daishū-in in June 1995 at the age of sixty-nine^[2]. His best-known English-language work, *Novice to Master: An Ongoing Lesson in the Extent of My Own Stupidity*, was assembled from his teachings and published posthumously by Wisdom Publications in 2002 and remains a widely read introduction to post-war Rinzai practice in English^[5].