Shuzan Shunsho

Shuzan Shunsho (1590–1647) was an early-Edo Sōtō abbot who received transmission from Kaiten Genju and passed it to Chozan Ginetsu (1581–1672). He lived through the consolidation of the Tokugawa shogunate — the period in which the *terauke* (temple-registration) system bound nearly all Japanese households to a local Buddhist temple, dramatically expanding the administrative responsibilities of Sōtō abbots while simultaneously placing pressure on the practice standards that Dōgen's original teaching had demanded^[1].

Shuzan occupied the link in the transmission chain through which the Sōtō line passed southward and westward from the Keizan-Gasan nexus around Sōji-ji toward the network of provincial temples that would sustain the school through the Edo period. The early Tokugawa generation of Sōtō abbots — of whom Shuzan was representative — had to balance the institutional demands of the new registration system against the preservation of the meditative and ritual forms that distinguished Sōtō from its Rinzai and Pure Land rivals^[1].