Yozan Keiyo

Yōzan Keiyō (1559–1629) was a Rinzai master in the Myōshin-ji line of the Ōtōkan stream, receiving Dharma transmission from Tōzen Sōshin (1532–1602) and transmitting it directly to Gudō Tōshoku (1577–1661) — the master who would launch the decisive seventeenth-century revival of Myōshin-ji and reshape the character of Edo-period Rinzai. Yōzan was thus the immediate teacher of the man Dumoulin calls "the outstanding Rinzai master of the early Edo period" and "the most important Rinzai master between Kanzan and Hakuin^[1]."

His career straddled the end of the Sengoku period and the first decades of Tokugawa stability: he received transmission in the era of Toyotomi Hideyoshi's final campaigns and died a decade into the settled Tokugawa peace. The Myōshin-ji transmission he carried had, by his generation, survived two centuries of political turbulence from the Ōnin War through the warring-states era, maintained by a chain of masters who practiced without major institutional support. That this chain reached Gudō Tōshoku intact — and that Gudō's revival then produced the Shidō Bunan → Shōju Rōjin → Hakuin lineage — makes Yōzan's generation a critical hinge in the history of Japanese Rinzai^[1].