Origins & Early Life

Sokei-an Shigetsu Sasaki (佐々木 指月 (曹渓庵); March 10, 1882 – May 17, 1945), born Yeita Sasaki (佐々木 栄多), was a Japanese Rinzai monk who founded the Buddhist Society of America (now the First Zen Institute of America) in New York City in 1930. Influential in the growth of Zen Buddhism in the United States, Sokei-an was one of the first Japanese masters to live and teach in America and the foremost purveyor in the U.S. of Direct Transmission. In 1944 he married American Ruth Fuller Everett.

Pivotal Works & Achievements

He died in May 1945 without leaving behind a Dharma heir. One of his better known students was Alan Watts, who studied under him briefly. Watts was a student of Sokei-an in the late 1930s. Sokei-an was born in Japan in 1882 as Yeita Sasaki. He was raised by his father, a Shinto priest, and his father's wife, though his birth mother was his father's concubine.

Enduring Legacy & Impact

Beginning at age four, his father taught him Chinese and soon had him reading Confucian texts. Following the death of his father when he was fifteen, he became an apprentice sculptor and came to study under Japan's renowned Koun Takamura at the Imperial Academy of Art in Tokyo. While in school he began his study of Rinzai Zen under...

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