If you were expecting to find the slightest trace of conformism, conventional
attitudes or stereotyped behaviour in the monk Kosen, you will be disappointed:
he does not have any. The monk Kosen is from the lineage of the great
iconoclastic masters, free from any yoke, liberated from every dogma
and always disconcerting. Kosen, Stephane Thibaut started his eventful
life in 1950, in Paris.
After many experiences in the agitation of the world, he comes across
the practice of the transmitted zen, with the man who was introducing
it to the Western World, the "Boddhidharma of modern times": Master
Taisen Deshimaru. Stephane is then nineteen years old. He becomes his
disciple, shaves his mop of hippie hair and is ordained as a zen monk.
From then on, he dedicates his life to the zen practice and follows
his master everywhere, until the later's death fifteen years later.
En 1984, Master Niwa Zenji, the highest authority of the Soto Zen in
Japan, hands him the transmission, (shiho), and makes him the 83rd successor
of Buddha Shakyamuni in the soto zen tradition. Since then, an international
sangha has formed around him. The monk Kosen animates an ever-increasing
number of dojos, gives conferences, develops a revolutionary internet
site and continues in many different ways his master's mission: to bring
to humankind the treasure of the true zen. In 1997, he published his
first book: "The Inner Revolution". In 1999, with the help of his whole
sangha, he founded in Argentina the first zen temple of South America,
the Shobogenji temple. In Europe as in South America, in Cuba as in
Canada, many disciples follow his teaching from sesshin to sesshin,
from continents to continents.
