Nishiari Bokusan

Nishiari Bokusan (西有穆山, 17 November 1821 – 4 December 1910), born Sasamoto Kazuyoshi in Hachinohe, Aomori, was the dominant Sōtō scholastic figure of the late Edo / early Meiji transition and the institutional bridge between the Tokugawa-era Dōgen scholarship of Manzan and Menzan and the modern Sōtō academic tradition^[1]. He received Dharma transmission from Ansō Taizen (also rendered Ansu Taigen) of Hon-nen-ji in Edo in 1842, served as abbot of Sōji-ji from 1901, was elected *Kanchō* (head priest) of the entire Sōtō school in 1902 and again in 1904, taught at proto-Komazawa University, and authored the *Shōbōgenzō Keiteki* — the most influential Meiji-era commentary on Dōgen's masterwork. Bodiford explicitly identifies him as the only pre-Meiji Sōtō teacher known to have lectured systematically on the *Shōbōgenzō*^[1][2].

His two principal Dharma heirs — Oka Sōtan (1860–1921), the founding abbot of Antai-ji, and Kishizawa Ian (1865–1955), the *Shōbōgenzō* lecturer at Eihei-ji and personal teacher of the young Shunryū Suzuki — are the figures through whom the modern Sōtō scholastic tradition reaches into the lineages of Sawaki Kōdō, Uchiyama Kōshō, Shunryū Suzuki, and the global twentieth-century Sōtō diaspora^[2].