Harada-Yasutani School

Harada–Yasutani School of Zen Buddhism (原田–安谷系 (Harada–Yasutani kei)) is a twentieth-century current of Japanese Zen that integrates the silent-illumination practice of the Sōtō school with the complete Rinzai kōan curriculum and extends that synthesis to lay practitioners worldwide.

The Harada-Yasutani lineage is distinct in Japanese Zen history because it deliberately fuses the two major Zen schools, Soto and Rinzai, into a single teaching stream and then re-exports that hybrid to lay practitioners around the world. Its first holder, Harada Daiun Sogaku (1871-1961), received full dharma transmission in Sōtō Zen from Harada Sōdō and, unusually, a second transmission in the Rinzai line from Dokutan Sōsan, so that in the lineage documents he appears both as the 31st Sōtō ancestor after Dōgen and the 8th Rinzai ancestor after Hakuin. His heir Haku'un Yasutani (1885-1973) then formalised this “dual-inheritance” as an independent stream, today called Harada-Yasutani or Sanbō-Kyōdan, whose subsequent teachers (Yamada Kōun, et al.) continued to present Sōtō shikantaza together with the full Rinzai kōan curriculum to monks and, for the first time, large numbers of lay men and women, Japanese and foreign alike.