Yishan Yining

Who was Yishan Yining?

Yishan Yining was a Chinese Buddhist monk who traveled to Japan. Before monkhood his family name was Hu.. He was born in 1247 in Linhai, Taizhou, Zhejiang, China. He was a monk of the Linji school during the Yuan Dynasty of China, and subsequently a Rinzai Zen master who rose to prominence in Kamakura Japan. He was one of the chief disseminators of Zen Buddhism among the new militarized nobility of Japan, a calligrapher and a writer. Mastering a variety of literary genres and being a prolific teacher, he is mostly remembered as the pioneer of Japanese Gozan Bungaku literature, that recreated in Japan the literary forms of Song China.