Sokei-an

Who They Were

Sokei-an Shigetsu Sasaki was a Japanese Rinzai Zen monk who carried his tradition across the Pacific and planted it in Manhattan. Born in Mie Prefecture in 1882, he arrived in the United States in his forties and spent the rest of his life teaching Americans how to sit in meditation and study koan — the paradoxical riddles that Rinzai practitioners work through with a teacher. In 1930 he founded the Buddhist Society of America in New York City, an organisation that still exists today as the First Zen Institute of America. He was one of the first Japanese Zen masters to live and teach in the United States, and he died in May 1945 without naming a Dharma heir to carry his lineage forward.

Life and Career

Sokei-an was born on 10 March 1882 in Mie Prefecture, in the fifteenth year of the Meiji era (明治, めいじ), the period of rapid modernisation that followed the collapse of the Tokugawa shogunate. His birth name was Yeita Sasaki (佐々木栄多). He trained as a Rinzai monk in Japan and also worked as a writer and journalist, an unusual combination for a Zen priest of his generation and one that shaped how he later presented Buddhism to a lay audience.

He reached the United States in the 1920s and settled in New York City, where in 1930 he established the Buddhist Society of America. The society offered regular meditation instruction and formal koan study — the Rinzai method in which a student meets privately with a teacher to present an answer to a koan and have it tested. Sokei-an was the foremost transmitter in America of what is called Direct Transmission (the teacher-to-student handing down of awakening outside scriptural study), and he taught in English to audiences with no background in Japanese religion or language.

Among his students in the late 1930s was Alan Watts, who studied under him briefly before going on to become one of the most widely read popularisers of Zen in the English-speaking world. In 1944 Sokei-an married Ruth Fuller Everett, an American student of his who would later become a significant Zen figure in her own right. He died on 17 May 1945.

Why They Matter

Before Sokei-an, Zen in America was largely a literary idea — something readers encountered in books and essays rather than in a meditation hall with a living teacher. By founding the Buddhist Society of America and taking students through formal koan practice, he turned it into an institution with a schedule, a membership, and a lineage claim. That mattered because Rinzai Zen is not a philosophy one can absorb from a text; it requires a teacher who can verify a student's insight, and Sokei-an was one of the very few people in the country authorised to do that work.

His timing was significant. He taught through the 1930s and the Second World War, years in which anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States was intense and Japanese residents faced surveillance and internment. That a Japanese monk kept a Zen centre running in New York through those years is part of why the tradition survived to be inherited by later generations of American practitioners.

He also left a problem. He died in May 1945 without a Dharma heir — without a successor formally acknowledged as having completed the transmission. The society he founded had to find another way to continue, and the question of who legitimately carries a lineage became, for American Zen, a live and contested one for decades afterwards.

The Name in Japanese

His name is written 佐々木指月. In kana it is read ささき しげつ, and in romaji it is Sasaki Shigetsu. The family name comes first, as is standard in Japanese.

佐々木 (ささき, Sasaki) — the surname, in three characters:

• 佐 (read さ, sa here) — to assist, to help. It appears in titles such as 佐官, a military rank.
• 々 — not a kanji with a sound of its own. It is a repetition mark, read as a doubled version of whatever precedes it. Here it repeats 佐, so 佐々 is sasa.
• 木 (read き, ki) — tree, wood. The full surname 佐々木 therefore reads Sasaki and means, roughly, "the helper trees" — a name with no doctrinal content, just a family designation.

指月 (しげつ, Shigetsu) — the given name, in two characters:

• 指 (read し, shi) — finger, to point.
• 月 (read げつ, getsu) — moon, month.

Together 指月 means "finger pointing at the moon." The image comes from a well-known Buddhist simile: the moon is awakening, and the teachings are only a finger indicating it. A student who mistakes the finger for the moon — who clutches the words instead of looking where they point — has missed the whole thing. It is a name that announces a position on scripture, and it suits a teacher who insisted that realisation is transmitted directly rather than read off a page.

The name 曹渓庵 (Sōkei-an), sometimes attached to him, is a hall name rather than part of his personal name: 曹渓 (Sōkei) refers to Caoxi, the place associated with the sixth patriarch of Chan Buddhism, and 庵 (an) means a hermitage or small hut. "Sokei-an" as he is known in English is this hall name, which is why it looks different from the characters of his personal name.

Legacy

The Buddhist Society of America that Sokei-an founded in 1930 continues as the First Zen Institute of America, still operating in New York City and still teaching in the Rinzai line he brought over. His marriage to Ruth Fuller Everett in 1944 tied his work to a partner who would go on to become a major figure in American Zen in her own right, and who helped carry the institute forward after his death.

His most visible legacy is indirect. Alan Watts, who studied with him in the late 1930s, became the writer through whom millions of English speakers first met Zen, and the tone of that encounter — practical, anti-dogmatic, suspicious of mere doctrine — owes something to the teacher who told his students that the words are only a finger. Sokei-an died in May 1945 with no Dharma heir, leaving his American students to work out for themselves how a lineage continues when the person holding it is gone.