Stephane Kosen Thibaut

Stéphane Jacques Germain Thibaut, known under the religious name Kōsen, was born on 26 May 1950 in the 16th arrondissement of Paris and died on 21 September 2025 in Montpellier at the age of 75^[1]. The son of the musician Gilles Thibaut and a teacher-psychologist mother, he studied theatre and mime at the École internationale Jacques Lecoq in Paris before, at nineteen, encountering Taisen Deshimaru, who was then introducing Sōtō Zen to Europe. He became Deshimaru's disciple, received the bodhisattva ordination under the name Kōsen, then the monastic ordination of a Zen monk in 1971, and practised at his master's side for some fifteen years until Deshimaru's death in 1982^[1][3].

In 1984, Niwa Rempō Zenji, abbot of Eihei-ji and the highest authority in Japanese Sōtō, conferred dharma transmission (shihō) on Thibaut, making him — by Sōtō reckoning — the 83rd successor of Shakyamuni Buddha in the Deshimaru line and one of only three of Deshimaru's disciples authenticated by Eihei-ji that year (alongside Étienne Mokushō Zeisler and Roland Yuno Rech)^[1][3]. From the 1990s he began an explicitly missionary work in Latin America. The academic study of Latin American Buddhism by C. E. Carini (2018) describes "a group linked to Deshimaru's lineage led by the Frenchman Stéphane Kōsen Thibaut" undertaking the first sustained Sōtō Zen mission in Argentina^[1]. **In 1999, near Capilla del Monte in the province of Córdoba, he founded Templo Shōbōgenji — recognised as the first Sōtō Zen temple of South America in the Deshimaru line, and the first Zen temple of any kind in Argentina^[1][2].** The temple drew disciples from Buenos Aires and across the country; Thibaut later ordained Toshiro Taigen Yamauchi and entrusted him with the Buenos Aires dōjō, and ordained Ariadna Dōsei Labbate, who in 2015 became the first woman Sōtō Zen master in Argentina^[2][3]. In 2008 he founded a second residential temple in France — Yūjō Nyūsanji, in the Parc naturel régional du Haut-Languedoc at Douch (commune of Rosis, Hérault) — which became the principal centre of the international Kōsen Sangha, uniting practitioners across Europe, Latin America, Cuba, and Canada^[1][2].

Throughout his life, Kōsen ordained many disciples as bodhisattvas, monks, and nuns, and conferred shihō on twelve recipients across six cohorts: in September 1993 on Bárbara Kōsen Richaudeau, André Ryūjō Meissner, and Édouard Shinryū Bagracbski "in the name of Master Deshimaru"; in 2002 on Yvon Myōken Bec "in the name of his fellow disciple Master Étienne Mokushō Zeisler"; in October 2009 at Caroux on Christophe Ryūrin Desmur and Pierre Sōkō Leroux; in 2013 on Loïc Kōshō Vuillemin; in 2015 on Ingrid Gyūji Igelnick, Françoise Jōmon Julien, Paula Reikiku Femenias, and Ariadna Dōsei Labbate; and in October 2016 at Shōbōgenji on Toshiro Taigen Yamauchi^[2][3]. His principal published works are *La Révolution intérieure* (Éditions de l'Œil Du Tigre, 1997), *Les cinq degrés de l'éveil : l'enseignement d'un moine zen* (Éditions du Relié, 2006), and *Chroniques de la grande sagesse* (Œil Du Tigre, 2017)^[1].

Together with the network he built and the dozen successors he authorised, these works place him among the principal architects of Deshimaru's lineage outside France — and the figure most responsible for bringing Sōtō Zen to Hispanophone South America^[1][2][4].