Sōtō school ［曹洞宗］ ( Sōtō-shū): One of the major schools of Zen in Japan. The founder was Dōgen, who went to China in 1223 and introduced the Ts’ao-tung ( Sōtō) school, one of the five schools of Chinese Zen, to Japan. After returning from China in 1227, he lived at Kennin-ji temple in Kyoto. Thereafter he moved to Fukakusa, where he founded Kōshō-ji temple and taught Zen, stressing the continued practice of seated meditation (zazen). Later he established Eihei-ji temple in Echizen Province as the principal monastery of Sōtō Zen practice. Tettsū Gikai, the third patriarch of Sōtō Zen, left Eihei-ji and lived at Daijō-ji in Kaga Province. His disciple Keizan Jōkin is revered as the founder of Sōji-ji temple in Noto Province. Sōji-ji was relocated and now stands in Kanagawa Prefecture as one of the two head temples of the school, the other being Eihei-ji. Sōtō emphasizes the continued practice of seated meditation, as opposed to meditation on kōan (Chin kung-an), questions for meditation inaccessible to logical solution taught in the Rinzai school of Zen.