Maura O’Halloran was born, the eldest of six children, in Boston, Massachusetts. Her mother was from nearby Maine, her father was from County Kerry. When Maura was four years old the family moved to the Dublin area where Maura was educated at Loreto convent schools. The O’Hallorans returned to the USA when Maura was eleven years old because of her father’s job, but when he was killed in a car crash shortly afterwards the family returned once again to Dublin.
Maura was academically bright and entered Trinity College in 1973, winning a scholarship that paid for her education. She graduated in 1977 with a joint degree in mathematical economics/statistics and sociology. Maura displayed a well-developed social conscience from early on in her life. During term-time she assisted organisations helping drug addicts in the city and she spent a summer break teaching autistic children in Northern Ireland. Other summers were spent indulging her great passion: foreign travel. She visited Europe and, after graduating, she worked her way around the USA and Canada, learning Spanish as she went.
Early in 1978 she took off for South America and again got involved in voluntary social work, this time with street children in Cuzco, Peru. In late 1978 it was back to Boston to earn some money for her next big trip. Late the following year, Maura set off for Japan, a country that had long fascinated her.
Maura, a naturally spiritual person, had been studying meditation and wanted to go deeper into the practice. In the winter of 1979, aged only twenty-four, she arrived at the Buddhist Toshoji Temple in Tokyo and asked to be admitted as a trainee monk. She was to spend three gruelling years in training there and at the associated Kannonji Temple, north of the city – the only woman and the only foreigner.
Reaching enlightenment through the study of Zen involves deep contemplation: one must exclude the superficialities of one’s life and surroundings to know one’s essential nature. Maura’s training included rising at dawn for the daily practice of meditation and chanting. She did manual work within the temple and its grounds, which had to be performed with exacting care, especially the more menial tasks. She joined in the time-honoured practice of begging – in the -20C winter of central Japan – and she survived on the minimum of sleep and food.
Maura embraced this strict régime wholeheartedly. She developed a deep love for her Japanese fellow-monks, felt privileged to be in the temple and, as she recorded in her journal, very ‘conscious of life’. The monks gave her the name Soshin, which means ‘enlightened, warm heart’. It was a name she liked it because it rhymed with Oisín (pron. Ush-een), and reminded her of her Irish roots.
Maura achieved the enviable state known as enlightenment the spring after her arrival. The head monk was so impressed with her self-discipline and hard work that he felt she could succeed him as the head of the temple in due course – an unheard-of idea in Japan. As time went on, Maura achieved almost saint-like status within the community. In one of her self-imposed disciplines she emulated a past Zen master, Dogen, by performing the practice known as prostration thousands of times per week, increasing her working day to twenty hours and reducing her sleep to three hours a night, which she took sitting up. In August 1982 she graduated as a Tenzo monk – the second position in the temple to the head monk.
Maura planned to found a temple and teach Zen in Ireland, but first she wanted to take a short break to explore Southeast Asia. One night, en route from Bangkok, Thailand, to the ancient northern capital of Chiang Mai, the bus she was travelling in crashed and Maura was one of the two passengers killed. She was twenty-seven years old.
Outside her beloved temple in Tokyo, there is a statue dedicated to her. Its inscription describes Maura as having the same heart and mind as the great teacher, Buddha.