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Ingen Ryuki [Yinyuan Longqi]
(b Fuqing County, Fujian Province, 1592; d Uji, 1673). Chinese monk, poet and calligrapher, active in Japan. Along with his disciples MOKUAN SHOTO and SOKUHI NYOITSU, he was extolled as one of the Obaku no Sanpitsu (‘Three Brushes of Obaku’), the three principal calligraphers of the Obaku Zen school. He was a leading southern Chinese Buddhist master who, not long after the end of the Ming period (1368–1644), emigrated to Nagasaki where, in the early 17th century, a community of Chinese merchants had established three Chinese Buddhist temples. In Japan Ingen quickly became a religious figure of national reputation, and was later celebrated as the founding patriarch of the Japanese Obaku Zen lineage (see BUDDHISM, §III, 10). A search for his father, who had disappeared when he was five, brought him at the age of 20 to a temple on Mt Putuo (Zhoushan Archipelago, off the coast of Zhejiang Prov.), where, it is recorded, he served tea to the monks. It was not until he was about 28, however, after the death of his mother, that he was able to be ordained as a Buddhist monk at his family temple, Wanfusi, on Mt Huangbo. He trained under the eminent monks Miyun Yuanwu (1566–1642) and Feiyin Tongrong (1593–1661), receiving ‘dharma transmission’ (i.e. recognition as an heir in the spiritual lineage) from the latter in 1633. Ingen first served as abbot of Wanfusi in 1637, but it was during his long second tenure, beginning in 1646, that Mt Huangbo was transformed into a thriving monastic complex. When the Chinese community in Nagasaki heard of Ingen’s renown, ITSUNEN SHOYU, abbot of the Chinese temple Kofukuji in that city, invited him to Japan. Ingen departed for Nagasaki in 1654 with some 30 monks and artisans, promising, however, to return to Mt Huangbo in three years.
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