Philippe Reiryū Coupey

Philippe Reiryū Coupey (born 8 December 1937 in New York City) is an American-born Sōtō Zen monk in the lineage of Taisen Deshimaru and Kōdō Sawaki, and one of the longest-serving teachers at the Dojo Zen de Paris. After studies in literature he settled in Paris in 1968 and met Deshimaru four years later, in 1972, becoming Reiryū Coupey — a close disciple who served as Deshimaru's principal English-language transcriber of the master's kusen until Deshimaru's death in 1982 (per fr.wikipedia, Association Zen Internationale, Buddhachannel)^[1].

After 1982 he continued teaching at AZI; since 1994 he has directed an annual summer session at La Gendronnière, the AZI mother temple. He is the spiritual reference for some thirty dōjōs across France, Germany, England, and Switzerland, teaches at the Dojo Zen de Paris and the Seine Zen group, and leads sesshins through his international community Sangha Sans demeure ("the Homeless Sangha", organised through Zen Road). On 31 August 2008, at the Dojo Zen de Paris, he received dharma transmission (shihō) from Master Kishigami Kōjun, completing a transmission lineage that traces back through Sawaki to Dōgen^[2].

His French books include Zen, simple assise — Le Fukanzazengi de Maître Dōgen (Désiris, 2009), Mon corps de lune (Désiris, 2007), Le chant du vent dans l'arbre sec (L'Originel, 2011), Dans le ventre du Dragon — Le Shinjinmei de Maître Sosan (Deux versants, 2002), Zen d'aujourd'hui (Le Relié, 2014), Les 10 taureaux du zen (2020), Fragments Zen (L'Originel, 2021), and the recent Minuit est la vraie lumière (Éditions de l'Éveil, 2023). His English-language Hohm Press editions Zen, Simply Sitting (2007), The Song of the Wind in the Dry Tree (2014), and In the Belly of the Dragon (2020) made the AZI lineage accessible to English-speaking readers, and as Deshimaru's transcriber he assembled the canonical posthumous Deshimaru titles La voix de la vallée (1994), Le rugissement du Lion (1994), Zen et karma (2016), and Les Deux Versants du Zen (2018). He also writes fiction under the pseudonym M.C. Dalley^[3].