Pierre Reigen Crépon

Pierre Reigen / Dōkan Crépon is a French Sōtō Zen monk in the Deshimaru lineage and the principal historian-biographer of Taisen Deshimaru in French. He is listed on the Association Zen Internationale teacher directory as Maître Pierre Dōkan Crépon (Dōkan being his Sōtō dharma name; Reigen the form preserved in older AZI records). Ordained by Deshimaru, he has taught within AZI for several decades^[1].

Crépon's enduring contribution is on the page. His long-form essay Maître Taisen Deshimaru et l'arrivée du zen en Europe — published on zen-azi.org and cited by the French Wikipedia article on Deshimaru as the canonical French-language source on the master's life — is the standard AZI account of Deshimaru's 1967 arrival in Paris and the founding decade of European Zen. Together with Évelyne Ekō de Smedt he co-authored L'Esprit du Zen (Hachette, 2005), one of the most widely-read French introductions to the tradition. He has also worked extensively as a translator of Buddhist literature^[2].

His combined institutional and editorial role — practising teacher and primary chronicler — has made him largely responsible for the standard biographical understanding of the AZI tradition's founder. Where another disciple might pass on the master's silence by sitting, Crépon has done it by writing the silence's history^[3].