Quick Facts
Biography
Shodo Harada (原田 正道, Harada Shōdō, c. 1940), or Harada Rōshi, is a Rinzai priest, author, and head abbot of Sōgen-ji — a three-hundred-year-old temple in Okayama, Japan. He has become known as a "teacher of teachers", with masters from various lineages coming to sit sesshin with him in Japan or during his trips to the United States and Europe.
Biography
Shodo Harada was born into a Zen temple in 1940 in Nara, Japan. While still in high school he encountered his teacher, Mumon Yamada, while running an errand for his father to Myōshin-ji. He was impressed by how little he knew of Buddhism at this encounter. After college he entered Shofukuji and began his training in 1962 under Rinzai master and Japanese calligrapher Mumon Yamada, from whom he received Dharma transmission in 1982.
In 1982 he was sent by Mumon to Sogen-ji to help an elderly abbot tend to the building and training schedules. In September 1989, Harada came to the United States to provide instruction for students and in 1995 founded One Drop Zendo (or, Tahoma One Drop Zen Monastery) on Whidbey Island in Island County, Washington, where the practice mirrors the practices found at Sogen-ji. Nearby the Tahoma One Drop Monastery, Harada has opened a hospice known as Enso House in 2001.
Among those Western teachers that study with Harada Roshi are Hogen Bays, Jan Chozen Bays, Mitra Bishop, and Paul Haller.
Roshi flew to the United States to perform the Jukai ceremony of Damien Echols. Echols (a member of the West Memphis Three) was wrongly convicted of the 1993 murders of three eight year-old boys in West Memphis, Arkansas. Whilst in prison, Echols began practicing Buddhism.