This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Around 1826, in the last years of his life, Ryokan met Teishin, a young Buddhist nun roughly forty years his junior, a documented late-life friendship distinct from the decades of solitary hermit life and refused temple rank his first article covers. Teishin had been widowed young after a brief marriage before she took vows, and the two exchanged visits and poems until Ryokan's death in 1831, a documented correspondence distinct from the largely private, unwitnessed verse-writing his first article describes him practicing alone in his mountain hut.
After Ryokan died, Teishin gathered his scattered poems, many of which existed only in loose drafts or in memory among those who had known him, and in 1835 published them as Hachisu no Tsuyu, Dew on the Lotus, a documented editorial undertaking distinct from the act of composition itself. The collection included verses the two had exchanged, read today as part of the same body of work that established his reputation, and it was Teishin's compilation rather than any effort of Ryokan's own that carried his poetry beyond the small circle who had known him during his lifetime.
That the poet remembered for choosing an unaffected, uncredentialed life over every mark of institutional standing owes his surviving reputation to a specific editorial act by another person, a nun compiling scattered pages after his death rather than any archive he kept himself, marks Teishin's Hachisu no Tsuyu as a documented case where a hermit's deliberate refusal to build a legacy was completed, after the fact, by someone who had known him only briefly.