Menzan Zuihō 面山瑞方 (Tenna 3 → 1683; Meiwa 6 / 1769), Edo-period Japanese Sōtō-Zen master, the principal scholar-monk of the eighteenth-century Sōtō school and the leading figure of the Manzan-school scholastic establishment after 道白 Manzan Dōhaku’s death (1715). Style-name (字) Menzan 面山 (“Facing-Mountain”); dharma-name Zuihō 瑞方 (“Auspicious-Direction”); also known as Fuku-rōjin 福老人 (“Fortunate Old-Man”), the sobriquet under which he appears in the prefaces of the texts he edited.
Tonsured young; a third-generation Manzan-line dharma-grandson; spent his career as a scholar-monk producing what amounts to the foundational scholarly commentary-corpus of modern Sōtō studies. Successively abbot of multiple Sōtō foundations including Eihei-ji in his late career.
Menzan’s scholarly output is enormous; the principal works include:
- Editor-publisher of KR6t0296 Kōmyōzō zanmai (Hōei 7 / 1710 first printing, with Eikei Genryō) — recovering Koun Ejō’s principal fa-yǔ.
- Commentaries on Dōgen — Shōbōgenzō shōtenroku 正法眼藏抄典録, the most important Edo-period commentary-aid on the Shōbōgenzō.
- Dōgen biography — the Eihei kaisan Dōgen Daiwajō kōroku 永平開山道元大和尚行録, the principal Edo-period systematic biography.
- Building — supervising the rebuilding of Eihei-ji after fire in the 1740s.
- The Kenkō fusetsu 建康普説 (KR6t0310) — a thirteen-chapter compendium of his Wakasa preaching, edited and printed in his late years (Meiwa 2 / 1765, age 83).
- The Zenkai shō 禪戒鈔 (KR6t0307) — a major Sōtō ordination-rules commentary.
Menzan represents the scholastic apogee of Edo-period Sōtō: working from within the Manzan-school institutional framework but with independent philological depth, his commentary-corpus is the foundational scholarship-base for nearly all modern Sōtō academic studies.