Zen

What it is

Zen — Chan in China, Seon in Korea, Thiền in Vietnam — is the Mahāyāna school defined by its emphasis on direct realisation through seated meditation, and by a corresponding suspicion of scripture, doctrine and conceptual explanation.

Its self-description is a verse traditionally attributed to Bodhidharma: a special transmission outside the scriptures; not depending on words and letters; pointing directly at the human mind; seeing one's nature and becoming a Buddha.

Two main Japanese schools:

Rinzai, from the Chinese Linji lineage, works with kōan — cases from the records of earlier masters, assigned by a teacher and worked on in and out of sitting, examined in private interview. Its rhetoric is of sudden breakthrough.

Sōtō, from Caodong, works with shikantaza, "just sitting" — sitting without object, without technique, and without seeking anything. Its founder in Japan, Dōgen (1200–1253), argued that practice is not a means to enlightenment but its expression: to sit is already the thing, not a way to get to it.

Where it came from

Chan emerged in Tang China, drawing on Indian Buddhist meditation traditions and on Daoist sensibilities. The Bodhidharma story — the Indian monk who came east and sat facing a wall for nine years — is legend rather than history.

The formative document is the Platform Sutra, framing a contest between gradual and sudden approaches and awarding it to the illiterate southerner Huineng. Scholars regard the account as a sectarian construction; the school it constructed became orthodoxy.

Chan reached Japan in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Zen becoming closely associated with the samurai class, with the tea ceremony, calligraphy, garden design and archery.

Its Western reception was shaped decisively by one man. D.T. Suzuki's English writings from the 1920s onward created the Western image of Zen: spontaneous, anti-intellectual, aesthetically refined, beyond doctrine, and continuous with mystical experience everywhere. Robert Sharf and others have argued that this presentation owes a great deal to Japanese nationalist self-representation and to what Western intellectuals wanted to hear, and that it does not describe Zen as practised in Japanese monasteries — which is ritualistic, hierarchical, disciplined and highly institutional.

How it is practised

Long periods of seated meditation, in a hall, in prescribed posture, with formal ritual — chanting, bowing, walking meditation, the ordering of meals. Rinzai practitioners work kōan and meet the teacher in sanzen. Retreats, sesshin, run for days with minimal sleep and long sitting.

The kōan is not a riddle. Its function is to place the mind in a position where conceptual resolution is unavailable, and to keep it there until something other than conceptual resolution occurs. Hakuin's "what is the sound of one hand?" and Zhaozhou's "mu" are the classic first cases.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the tradition is deep, the literature is extraordinary, and Dōgen in particular is a major philosophical figure whose writing on time and practice is studied outside Buddhist studies entirely.

We can say the popular Western image is substantially a twentieth-century construction, and that actual Zen involves a great deal more ritual, hierarchy and institutional obligation than the paperback version suggests.

We can say — and a site being honest about this territory has to — that modern Zen has two documented institutional failures.

Wartime complicity. Brian Victoria's Zen at War (1997) documented that major Zen figures actively supported Japanese militarism before and during the Second World War, providing religious justification for the war effort, and that this included teachers in the lineages of prominent Western Zen schools. Several institutions have since issued formal apologies. It is not a marginal episode involving obscure figures, and for decades it was simply not mentioned in Western Zen literature.

Teacher misconduct. Several American Zen communities have gone through documented sexual misconduct scandals involving senior teachers, addressed in sexual misconduct by teachers. The structural conditions described under the guru problem apply with particular force in a tradition where the teacher's certification of a student's realisation is central and unchallengeable.

Neither fact discredits the practice, and both were surfaced largely by practitioners. But a tradition whose central claim is that realisation transforms the person has a specific difficulty when realised people behave like this, and the honest versions of Zen have engaged with that rather than deflecting it.

We cannot say what happens in kenshō, and the tradition would say that asking in these terms is already the error.

Further reading

• Dōgen, Shōbōgenzō — difficult, and unlike anything else.
• Brian Victoria, Zen at War (1997).
• Robert Sharf, "The Zen of Japanese Nationalism" (1993) — on how the Western image was built.