A Japanese Buddhist monk or priest; a variant transcription of the word for a religious practitioner in Zen or other Japanese Buddhism.
From Japanese えしん or 栄新, terms for monks or priests in Buddhist temples. The spelling reflects historical attempts to romanize Japanese religious terminology.
When Western scholars first wrote about Japanese Buddhism, they had to invent ways to spell Japanese words using English letters—eshin is one of those early attempts, and the variation in spelling shows how uncertain early cultural encounters really were.
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