Yamada Reirin

Yamada Reirin (山田霊林, 1889–1979) was a senior twentieth-century Sōtō priest and Sōtōshū prelate, best known internationally as the master who in 1970 formally regularised Taisen Deshimaru's Sōtō status by conferring on him dharma transmission (shihō) — the Sōtōshū-registered transmission that the much-discussed 1965 deathbed entrustment from Kōdō Sawaki had not produced^[1][2]. The Yamada Reirin transmission came after the then-abbot of Antai-ji had declined to regularise Deshimaru's status (citing Deshimaru's unwillingness to undertake the requisite Antai-ji formation time); Yamada provided the institutional bridge that brought the Paris mission inside Sōtōshū's recognised succession^[2]. Beyond the Deshimaru case, Yamada's own line and his predecessors within the Sōtōshū head-temple system are not yet seeded in this database, and a fuller portrait would require Japanese-language temple-register research.