Tokuo Ryoko

Tokuo Ryoko (1649–1709) was an early-Edo Sōtō master who received Dharma transmission directly from Gesshū Sōko (1618–1696) — the reformer who launched the *shūtō fukko*, the seventeenth-century restoration of face-to-face transmission in the Sōtō school — and transmitted it to both Hogen Soren and Mokushi Soen (1673–1746). As a first-generation Dharma heir of Gesshū, Tokuo occupied a critical position in the reformed lineage: it was through figures like him that the institutional correction Gesshū had demanded was carried forward into the next generation^[1].

The *shūtō fukko* culminated in 1703–1704 when Manzan Dōhaku, Gesshū's most eminent student, obtained shogunal recognition for the ban on hereditary temple-assignment (*garanbō*) transmission — a ruling that formally required genuine face-to-face Dharma confirmation. Tokuo died in 1709, just after this ruling took effect, and his students would carry the reformed standard through the eighteenth century. His lineage through Mokushi Soen to Gangoku Gankei and Gento Sokuchu represents one of the main conduits of post-reform Sōtō into the period of Menzan Zuihō's great editorial revival of Dōgen's texts^[1].