History
Sanbō Kyōdan was founded by Yasutani Haku'un in 1954. It is rooted in the thinking of Harada Daiun Sogaku, a Sōtō priest who also studied with Rinzai priests. Both Harada Roshi and Yasutani Roshi were strong promoters of Zen practice for lay practitioners, and for people of other (non-Buddhist, non-Asian) faith communities and cultures. Their openness to lay practitioners was in line with the modernizing tendency of the Meiji restoration, which began in 1868. Starting in this period, various Zen institutions began to give permission to lay followers to practice Zen.
The leaders of the Sanbo Kyodan were involved in the contemporary social and cultural developments in Japan, which followed the abandonment of the mediaeval feudal system and its opening up to foreign influences and modern western technology and culture. The association of some of them with the fierce militaristic nationalism of the mid-20th century Empire of Japan has become controversial. Within Japanese Buddhism, there was a development of Buddhist modernism, but also a tendency to support the autocratic regime in the interest of survival.
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“All things are moral. That soul, which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength.”
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—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)