Hans Rudolf Doring began practicing Zen in 1977 and trained for years in Japan before receiving the Buddhist name Dorin Genpo. He founded the Hakuin-Zen-Gemeinschaft in Munich in 1988, was fully ordained as a Rinzai priest in 1992, and went on to lead the Bodaisan Shoboji temple in Dinkelscherben, Bavaria, where he directed religious training for prospective Zen teachers. He also sat on the board of the Deutsche Buddhistische Union, Germany's national Buddhist umbrella body, from 1985 to 2008, and served as a vice president of the World Fellowship of Buddhists, making him one of the country's most prominent Buddhist clerics.
In July 2017, the Augsburg Regional Court convicted him on 25 counts of child sexual abuse. Prosecutors found that between 2001 and 2016 he had groomed and molested seven boys aged four to thirteen, and had collected roughly 2,800 images and videos documenting the abuse. Doring admitted the offences as his trial opened, sparing his victims the need to testify, and was sentenced to seven years and nine months in prison. He appealed only the length of the sentence, not the finding of guilt.
Both institutions that had given him standing responded publicly. The Hakuin-Zen-Gemeinschaft, the group he had founded, and the Deutsche Buddhistische Union issued statements condemning his conduct and addressing his victims. The case is a reminder that documented clergy abuse is not bound to any one Buddhist lineage: Rinzai, one of the two principal schools of Japanese Zen and itself a form of Mahayana Buddhism, carries its own now-documented case, distinct from the Vajrayana material already on this atlas.