This article is about Chan/Zen Buddhism in China. For an overview of the school, see Zen.

Chan (simplified Chinese: ; traditional Chinese: ; pinyin: Chn; abbr. of Chinese: ; pinyin: chnn), from Sanskrit dhyna (meaning "meditation" or "meditative state"), is a Chinese school of Mahyna Buddhism. It developed in China from the 6th century CE onwards, becoming dominant during the Tang and Song dynasties. After the Yuan, Chan more or less fused with Pure Land Buddhism.

Chan spread south to Vietnam as Thin and north to Korea as Seon, and, in the 13th century, east to Japan as Zen.

The historical records required for a complete, accurate account of early Chan history no longer exist.[3]

The history of Chan in China can be divided into several periods. Chan as we know it today is the result of a long history, with many changes and contingent factors. Each period had different types of Chan, some of which have remained influential, while others vanished.

Ferguson distinguishes three periods from the fifth century into the thirteenth century:

Although McRae has reservations about the division of Chan's history in phases or periods, he nevertheless distinguishes four phases in the history of Chan:

Neither Ferguson nor McRae gives a periodisation for Chinese Chan after the Song Dynasty, though McRae mentions "at least a post-classical phase or perhaps multiple phases".[note 2]

When Buddhism came to China, it was adapted to the Chinese culture and understanding. Theories about the influence of other schools in the evolution of Chan vary widely and heavily reliant upon speculative correlation rather than on written records or histories. Some scholars have argued that Chan developed from the interaction between Mahyna Buddhism and Taoism, while others insist that Chan has roots in yogic practices, specifically kammahna, the consideration of objects, and kasia, total fixation of the mind.[21] A number of other conflicting theories exist.

Buddhism was exposed to Confucian and Taoist influences when it came to China. Goddard quotes D.T. Suzuki,[note 3] calling Chan a "natural evolution of Buddhism under Taoist conditions". Buddhism was first identified to be "a barbarian variant of Taoism", and Taoist terminology was used to express Buddhist doctrines in the oldest translations of Buddhist texts, a practice termed "matching the concepts".

Judging from the reception by the Han of the Hinayana works and from the early commentaries, it appears that Buddhism was being perceived and digested through the medium of religious Daoism (Taoism). Buddha was seen as a foreign immortal who had achieved some form of Daoist nondeath. The Buddhists' mindfulness of the breath was regarded as an extension of Daoist breathing exercises.

The first Buddhist recruits in China were Taoists. They developed high esteem for the newly introduced Buddhist meditational techniques, and blended them with Taoist meditation. Representatives of early Chinese Buddhism like Sengzhao and Tao Sheng were deeply influenced by the Taoist keystone works of Laozi and Zhuangzi. Against this background, especially the Taoist concept of naturalness was inherited by the early Chan disciples: they equated to some extent the ineffable Tao and Buddha-nature, and thus, rather than feeling bound to the abstract "wisdom of the stras", emphasized Buddha-nature to be found in "everyday" human life, just as the Tao.

Neo-Taoist concepts were taken over in Chinese Buddhism as well. Concepts such as T'i-yung ( Essence and Function) and Li-shih ( Noumenon and Phenomenon, or Principle and Practice) were first taken over by Hua-yen Buddhism, which consequently influenced Chan deeply. On the other hand, Taoists at first misunderstood sunyata to be akin to the Taoist non-being.

The emerging Chinese Buddhism nevertheless had to compete with Taoism and Confucianism:

Because Buddhism was a foreign influence, however, and everything "barbarian" was suspect, certain Chinese critics were jolted out of complacency by the spread of the dharma [...] In the first four centuries of the Christian Era, this barbarian influence was infiltrating China just when it was least politically stable and more vulnerable to sedition. As the philosophy and practice infiltrated society, many traditionalists banded together to stop the foreign influence, not so much out of intolerance (an attitude flatly rejected by both Taoism and Confucianism), but because they felt that the Chinese world view was being turned upside down.

When Buddhism came to China, there were three divisions of training:

It was in this context that Buddhism entered into Chinese culture. Three types of teachers with expertise in each training practice developed:

Monasteries and practice centers were created that tended to focus on either the Vinaya and training of monks or the teachings focused on one scripture or a small group of texts. Dhyna (Chan) masters tended to practice in solitary hermitages, or to be associated with vinaya training monasteries or the dharma teaching centers. The later naming of the Zen school has its origins in this view of the threefold division of training.

McRae goes so far as to say:

...one important feature must not be overlooked: Chan was not nearly as separate from these other types of Buddhist activities as one might think [...] [T]he monasteries of which Chan monks became abbots were comprehensive institutions, "public monasteries" that supported various types of Buddhist activities other than Chan-style meditation. The reader should bear this point in mind: In contrast to the independent denominations of Soto and Rinzai that emerged (largely by government fiat) in seventeenth-century Japan, there was never any such thing as an institutionally separate Chan "school" at any time in Chinese Buddhist history (emphasis McRae).[35]

The Chan tradition ascribes the origins of Chan in India to the Flower Sermon, the earliest source for which comes from the 14th century.[36] It is said that Gautama Buddha gathered his disciples one day for a Dharma talk. When they gathered together, the Buddha was completely silent and some speculated that perhaps the Buddha was tired or ill. The Buddha silently held up and twirled a flower and his eyes twinkled; several of his disciples tried to interpret what this meant, though none of them were correct. One of the Buddha's disciples, Mahkyapa, gazed at the flower and broke into laugher. The Buddha then acknowledged Mahkyapa's insight by saying the following:[21]

I possess the true Dharma eye, the marvelous mind of Nirva, the true form of the formless, the subtle Dharma gate that does not rest on words or letters but is a special transmission outside of the scriptures. This I entrust to Mahkyapa.

Traditionally the origin of Chan in China is credited to the Indian monk Bodhidharma. Only scarce historical information is available about him, but his hagiography developed when the Chan tradition grew stronger and gained prominence in the early 8th century. By this time a lineage of the six ancestral founders of Chan in China was developed.[37] In the late 8th century, under the influence of Huineng's student Shenhui, the traditional form of this lineage had been established:[37]

In later writings this lineage was extended to include 28 Indian patriarchs. In the Song of Enlightenment ( Zhngdo g) of Yongjia Xuanjue (, 665713), one of the chief disciples of Hunng, it is written that Bodhidharma was the 28th patriarch in a line of descent from Mahkyapa, a disciple of kyamuni Buddha, and the first patriarch of Chan Buddhism.

Mahkyapa was the first, leading the line of transmission;Twenty-eight Fathers followed him in the West;The Lamp was then brought over the sea to this country;And Bodhidharma became the First Father here:His mantle, as we all know, passed over six Fathers,And by them many minds came to see the Light.

In its beginnings in China, Chan primarily referred to the Mahyna stras and especially to the Lakvatra Stra.[40] As a result, early masters of the Chan tradition were referred to as "Lakvatra masters". As the Lakvatra Stra teaches the doctrine of the Ekayna "One Vehicle", the early Chan school was sometimes referred to as the "One Vehicle School". In other early texts, the school that would later become known as Chan is sometimes even referred to as simply the "Lakvatra school" (Ch. , Lngqi Zng).[42] Accounts recording the history of this early period are to be found in the Records of the Lakvatra Masters (Chinese: ).

The establishment of Chan in China is traditionally credited to the Buddhist monk Bodhidharma, who is recorded as having come to China during the time of Southern and Northern Dynasties to teach a "special transmission outside scriptures" which "did not stand upon words".

Little contemporary biographical information on Bodhidharma is extant, and subsequent accounts became layered with legend.[37] There are three principal sources for Bodhidharma's biography:[43] The Record of the Buddhist Monasteries of Luoyang by Yng Xunzh's (, 547), Tan Lin's preface to the Long Scroll of the Treatise on the Two Entrances and Four Practices (6th century CE), and Dayi Daoxin's Further Biographies of Eminent Monks (7th century CE).

These sources vary in their account of Bodhidharma being either "from Persia" (547 CE), "a Brahman monk from South India" (645 CE), "the third son of a Brahman king of South India" (c. 715 CE).[37] Some traditions specifically describe Bodhidharma to be the third son of a Pallava king from Kanchipuram.[web 1]

The Long Scroll of the Treatise on the Two Entrances and Four Practices written by Tan Lin (; 506574), contains teachings which are attributed to Bodhidharma. The text is known from the Dunhuang manuscripts. The two entrances to enlightenment are the entrance of principle and the entrance of practice:

The entrance of principle is to become enlightened to the Truth on the basis of the teaching. One must have a profound faith in the fact that one and the same True Nature is possessed by all sentient beings, both ordinary and enlightened, and that this True Nature is only covered up and made imperceptible [in the case of ordinary people] by false sense impressions".[45]

The entrance of practice includes the following four increments:

This text was used and studied by Huike and his students. The True Nature refers to the Buddha-nature.[45]

Bodhidharma settled in Northern Wei China. Shortly before his death, Bodhidharma appointed his disciple Dazu Huike to succeed him, making Huike the first Chinese-born ancestral founder and the second ancestral founder of Chan in China. Bodhidharma is said to have passed three items to Huike as a sign of transmission of the Dharma: a robe, a bowl, and a copy of the Lakvatra Stra. The transmission then passed to the second ancestral founder Dazu Huike, the third Sengcan, the fourth ancestral founder Dayi Daoxin, and the fifth ancestral founder Daman Hongren.

The period of Dayi Daoxin (580651) and Daman Hongren ( 601674) came to be called the East Mountain Teaching due to the location of the residence of Daman Hongren in Huangmei County, modern Anhui. The term was used by Yuquan Shenxiu, the most important successor to Hongren.[47] The East Mountain community was a specialized meditation training centre. Hongren was a plain meditation teacher, who taught students of "various religious interests", including "practitioners of the Lotus Sutra, students of Madhyamaka philosophy, or specialists in the monastic regulations of Buddhist Vinaya".[48] The establishment of a community in one location was a change from the wandering lives of Bodhiharma and Huike and their followers.[48] It fitted better into the Chinese society, which highly valued community-oriented behaviour, instead of solitary practice.[49]

Yuquan Shenxiu (, 606?706) was the most important successor to Hongren. In 701 he was invited to the Imperial Court by Zhou Empress Wu Zetian, who paid him due imperial reverence. The first lineage documents were produced in this period:

[T]he genealogical presentation of the Chan transmission was first recorded on paper in the early years of metropolitan Chan activity. The earliest recorded instance of this was in the epitaph for a certain Faru, a student of Hongren's who died in 689, and by the second decade of the 8th century, the later followers of Hongren had produced two separate texts describing the transmission from Bodhidharma to Shenxiu.[50]

The transition from the East Mountain to the two capitals changed the character of Chan:

[I]t was only when Hongren's successors moved into the environment of the two capitals, with its literate society and incomparably larger urban scale, that well-written texts were required for disseminating the teaching.[51]

According to tradition, the sixth and last ancestral founder, Huineng (; 638713), was one of the giants of Chan history, and all surviving schools regard him as their ancestor.[52] The dramatic story of Huineng's life tells that there was a controversy over his claim to the title of patriarch. After being chosen by Hongren, the fifth ancestral founder, Huineng had to flee by night to Nanhua Temple in the south to avoid the wrath of Hongren's jealous senior disciples.

Modern scholarship, however, has questioned this narrative. Historic research reveals that this story was created around the middle of the 8th century, beginning in 731 by Shenhui, a successor to Huineng, to win influence at the Imperial Court. He claimed Huineng to be the successor of Hongren instead of Shenxiu, the recognized successor.[37] In 745 Shenhui was invited to take up residence in the Heze Temple in the capital, Dongdu (modern Luoyang) In 753, he fell out of grace and had to leave Dongdu to go into exile.

The most prominent of the successors of Shenhui's lineage was Guifeng Zongmi.[53] According to Zongmi, Shenhui's approach was officially sanctioned in 796, when "an imperial commission determined that the Southern line of Ch'an represented the orthodox transmission and established Shen-hui as the seventh patriarch, placing an inscription to that effect in the Shen-lung temple".

Doctrinally, Shenhui's "Southern School" is associated with the teaching that enlightenment is sudden while the "Northern" or East Mountain school is associated with the teaching that enlightenment is gradual. This was a polemical exaggeration since both schools were derived from the same tradition, and the so-called Southern School incorporated many teachings of the more influential Northern School.[37] Eventually both schools died out, but the influence of Shenhui was so immense that all later Chan schools traced their origin to Huineng, and "sudden enlightenment" became a standard doctrine of Chan.[37]

Shenhui's influence is traceable in the Platform Sutra, which gives a popular account of the story of Huineng but also reconciles the antagonism created by Shenhui. Salient is that Shenhui himself does not figure in the Platform Sutra; he was effectively written out of Chan history. The Platform Sutra also reflects the growing popularity of the Diamond Stra (Vajracchedik Prajpramit Stra) in 8th-century Chinese Buddhism. Thereafter, the essential texts of the Chan school were often considered to be both the Lakvatra Stra and the Diamond Stra. The Lakvatra Stra, which endorses the Buddha-nature, emphasized purity of mind, which can be attained in gradations. The Diamond-sutra emphasizes sunyata, which "must be realized totally or not at all". David Kalupahana associates the later Caodong school (Japanese St, gradual) and Linji school (Japanese Rinzai school, sudden) schools with the Yogacara and Madhyamaka philosophies respectively. The same comparison has been made by McRae. The Madhyamaka school elaborated on the theme of nyat, which was set forth in the prajnaparamita sutras, to which the Diamond Sutra also belongs. The shift from the Lakvatra Stra to the Diamond Sutra also signifies a tension between Buddha-nature teachings, which imply a transcendental reality, versus nyat, which denies such a transcendental reality.

Chinese Chan Buddhist teachers such as Moheyan first went to Tibet in the eighth century during the height of the Tibetan Empire.[62] There seems to have been disputes between them and Indian Buddhists, as exemplified by the Samye debate. Many Tibetan Chan texts have been recovered from the caves at Dunhuang, where Chan and Tantric Buddhists lived side by side and this led to religious syncretism in some cases.[63] Chan Buddhism survived in Tibet for several centuries,[64] but had mostly been replaced by the 10th century developments in Tibetan Buddhism. According to Sam Van Schaik:

After the 'dark period', all visible influences of Chan were eliminated from Tibetan Buddhism, and Mahayoga and Chan were carefully distinguished from each other. This trendcan already be observed in the tenth-century Lamp for the Eyes in Contemplation by the great central Tibetan scholar Gnubs chen Sangs rgyas ye shes. This influential work represented a crucial step in the codification of Chan, Mahayoga and the Great Perfection as distinct vehicles to enlightenment. In comparison, our group of [Dunhuang] manuscripts exhibits a remarkable freedom, blurring the lines between meditation systems which were elsewhere kept quite distinct. The system of practice set out in these manuscripts did not survive into the later Tibetan tradition. Indeed, this creative integration of meditation practices derived from both Indic and Chinese traditions could only have been possible during the earliest years of Tibetan Buddhism, when doctrinal categories were still forming, and in this sense it represents an important stage in the Tibetan assimilation of Buddhism.[63]

Daoxin, Hongren, Shenxiu, Huineng and Shenhui all lived during the early Tang. The later period of the Tang Dynasty is traditionally regarded as the "golden age" of Chan. This proliferation is described in a famous saying:

Look at the territory of the house of Tang The whole of it is the realm of the Chan school.

The An Lushan Rebellion (755763) led to a loss of control by the Tang dynasty, and changed the Chan scene again. Metropolitan Chan began to lose its status, while "other schools were arising in outlying areas controlled by warlords. These are the forerunners of the Chan we know today. Their origins are obscure; the power of Shen-hui's preaching is shown by the fact that they all trace themselves to Hui-neng."[66]

The most important of these schools is the Hongzhou school () of Mazu, to which also belong Shitou, Baizhang Huaihai, Huangbo and Linji (Rinzai). Linji is also regarded as the founder of one of the Five Houses.

This school developed "shock techniques such as shouting, beating, and using irrational retorts to startle their students into realization". Some of these are common today, while others are found mostly in anecdotes. It is common in many Chan traditions today for Chan teachers to have a stick with them during formal ceremonies which is a symbol of authority and which can be also used to strike on the table during a talk.

These shock techniques became part of the traditional and still popular image of Chan masters displaying irrational and strange behaviour to aid their students.[37][68] Part of this image was due to later misinterpretations and translation errors, such as the loud belly shout known as katsu. "Katsu" means "to shout", which has traditionally been translated as "yelled 'katsu'" which should mean "yelled a yell".[web 2]

A well-known story depicts Mazu practicing dhyana, but being rebuked by his teacher Nanyue Huairang, comparing seated meditation with polishing a tile. According to Faure, the criticism is not about dhyana as such, but "the idea of "becoming a Buddha" by means of any practice, lowered to the standing of a "means" to achieve an "end"". The criticism of seated dhyana reflects a change in the role and position of monks in Tang society, who "undertook only pious works, reciting sacred texts and remaining seated in dhyana". Nevertheless, seated dhyana remained an important part of the Chan tradition, also due to the influence of Guifeng Zongmi, who tried to balance dhyana and insight.

The Hung-chou school has been criticised for its radical subitism. Guifeng Zongmi ( ) (780841), an influential teacher-scholar and patriarch of both the Chan and the Huayan school, claimed that the Hongzhou school teaching led to a radical nondualism that denies the need for spiritual cultivation and moral discipline. While Zongmi acknowledged that the essence of Buddha-nature and its functioning in the day-to-day reality are but difference aspects of the same reality, he insisted that there is a difference.

Traditionally Shtu Xqin (Ch. , c. 700 c.790) is seen as the other great figure of this period. In the Chan lineages he is regarded as the predecessor of the Caodong (St) school. He is also regarded as the author of the Sandokai, a poem which formed the basis for the Song of the Precious Mirror Samadhi of Dongshan Liangjie (Jp. Tzan Rykan) and the teaching of the Five Ranks.

During 845846 Emperor Wuzong persecuted the Buddhist schools in China:

It was a desperate attempt on the part of the hard-pressed central government, which had been in disarray since the An Lu-shan rebellion of 756, to gain some measure of political, economic, and military relief by preying on the Buddhist temples with their immense wealth and extensive lands.[75]

This persecution was devastating for metropolitan Chan, but the Chan school of Ma-tsu and his likes survived, and took a leading role in the Chan of the later Tang.[75]

After the fall of the Tang Dynasty, China was without effective central control during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period. China was divided into several autonomous regions. Support for Buddhism was limited to a few areas. The Hua-yen and T'ient-tai schools suffered from the changing circumstances, since they had depended on imperial support. The collapse of T'ang society also deprived the aristocratic classes of wealth and influence, which meant a further drawback for Buddhism. Shenxiu's Northern School and Henshui's Southern School didn't survive the changing circumstances. Nevertheless, Chan emerged as the dominant stream within Chinese Buddhism, but with various schools developing various emphasises in their teachings, due to the regional orientation of the period. The Fayan school, named after Fa-yen Wen-i (885958) became the dominant school in the southern kingdoms of Nan-T'ang (Jiangxi, Chiang-hsi) and Wuyue (Che-chiang).

The Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period was followed by the Song Dynasty, which established a strong central government. During the Song Dynasty, Chan () was used by the government to strengthen its control over the country, and Chan grew to become the largest sect in Chinese Buddhism. An ideal picture of the Chan of the Tang period was produced, which served the legacy of this newly acquired status:

In the Song dynasty (9601279), Chinese Chan Buddhism reached something of a climax paradigm. By "climax paradigm", I mean a conceptual configuration by which Chan was described in written texts, practiced by its adherents, and by extension understood as a religious entity by the Chinese population as a whole ... Previous events in Chan were interpreted through the lens of the Song dynasty configuration, and subsequent developments in China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam were evaluated, even as they occurred, against what was known of the standards established during the Song. Thus the romanticized image of the great Tang dynasty masters Mazu and his students, Caoshan, Dongshan, and their students, and of course Linji was generated by Song dynasty authors and functioned within Song dynasty texts. Similarly, even where subsequent figures throughout East Asia Hakuin Ekaku (16851769), the famous reviver of Japanese Rinzai, is the best example evoke the examples of Bodhidharma, the Sixth Patriarch Huineng, Mazu, and the others, they do so through the conceptual filter of Song-dynasty Chan.[77]

During the Song the Five Houses (Ch. ) of Chan, or five "schools", were recognized. These were not originally regarded as "schools" or "sects", but based on the various Chan-genealogies. Historically they have come to be understood as "schools".

The Five Houses of Chan are:[3]

The Linji-school became the dominant school within Chan, due to support from literati and the court. Before the Song Dynasty, the Linji-school is rather obscure, and very little is known about its early history. The first mention of Linji is in the Zutang ji, compiled in 952, 86 years after Linji's death. But the Zutang ji pictures the Xuefeng Yicun lineage as heir to the legacy of Mazu and the Hongzhou-school.

According to Welter, the real founder of the Linji-school was Shoushan (or Baoying) Shengnian () (926993), a fourth generation dharma-heir of Linji. The Tiansheng Guangdeng lu (), "Tiansheng Era Expanded Lamp Record", compiled by the official Li Zunxu () (9881038) confirms the status of Shoushan Shengnian, but also pictures Linji as a major Chan patriarch and heir to the Mazu, displacing the prominence of the Fayan-lineage. It also established the slogan of "a special transmission outside the teaching", supporting the Linji-school claim of "Chan as separate from and superior to all other Buddhist teachings".

Over the course of Song Dynasty (9601279), the Guiyang, Fayan, and Yunmen schools were gradually absorbed into the Linji. Song Chan was dominated by the Linji school of Dahui Zonggao, which in turn became strongly affiliated to the Imperial Court:

...the Ta-hui school of Sung Chan had become closely associated with the Sung court, high officials, and the literati [...] With the establishment of the Wu-shan (Gozan) system during the Southern Sung the school of Ta-hui took precedence. The Chinese bureaucratic system entered into Chan temples throughout the country, and a highly organized system of temple rank and administration developed.[83]

The Gozan system was a system of state-controlled temples, which were established by the Song government in all provinces.[84]

The teaching styles and words of the classical masters were recorded in the so-called "encounter dialogues".[85] Snippets of these encounter dialogues were collected in texts as the Blue Cliff Record (1125) of Yuanwu, The Gateless Gate (1228) of Wumen, both of the Linji lineage, and the Book of Equanimity (1223) by Wansong Xingxiu of the Caodong lineage.

These texts became classic gng'n cases, together with verse and prose commentaries, which crystallized into the systematized gng'n (koan) practice. According to Miura and Sasaki, "[I]t was during the lifetime of Yan-wu's successor, Dahui Zonggao (; 10891163) that Koan Chan entered its determinative stage."[86]Gng'n practice was prevalent in the Linji school, to which Yuanwu and Dahui belonged, but it was also employed on a more limited basis by the Caodong school.

The recorded encounter dialogues, and the koan collections which derived from this genre, mark a shift from solitary practice to interaction between master and student:

The essence of enlightenment came to be identified with the interaction between masters and students. Whatever insight dhyana might bring, its verification was always interpersonal. In effect, enlightenment came to be understood not so much as an insight, but as a way of acting in the world with other people[87]

This mutual enquiry of the meaning of the encounters of masters and students of the past gave students a role model:

One looked at the enlightened activities of one's lineal forebears in order to understand one's own identity [...] taking the role of the participants and engaging in their dialogues instead[note 4]

Koan practice was a literary practice, styling snippets of encounter-dialogue into well-edited stories. It arose in interaction with "educated literati".[89]

There were dangers involved in such a literary approach, such as fixing specific meanings to the cases.[89] Dahui Zonggao is even said to have burned the woodblocks of the Blue Cliff Record, for the hindrance it had become to study of Chan by his students[90]

The Caodong was the other school to survive into the Song period. Its main protagonist was Hung-chih Cheng-chueh, a contemporary of Dahui Zonggao. It put emphasis on "silent illumination", or "just sitting". This approach was attacked by Dahui as being mere passivity, and lacking emphasis on gaining insight into one's true nature. Cheng-chueh in his turn criticized the emphasis on koan study.[91]

The Yuan dynasty was the empire established by Kublai Khan, the leader of the Borjigin clan, after the Mongol Empire conquered the Jin dynasty (11151234) and the Southern Song Dynasty. Chan began to be mixed with Pure Land Buddhism as in the teachings of Zhongfeng Mingben (12631323).[citation needed]

Chan Buddhism enjoyed something of a revival in the Ming dynasty, with teachers such as Hanshan Deqing (), who wrote and taught extensively on both Chan and Pure Land Buddhism; Miyun Yuanwu (), who came to be seen posthumously as the first patriarch of the baku school of Zen; and as Yunqi Zhuhong () and Ouyi Zhixu ().

Chan was taught alongside Pure Land Buddhism in many monasteries. In time much of the distinction between them was lost, and many masters taught both Chan and Pure Land.[92]

With the downfall of the Ming, several Chan masters fled to Japan, founding the baku school.

In the beginning of the Qing dynasty, Chan was "reinvented", by the "revival of beating and shouting practices" by Miyun Yuanwu (15661642), and the publication of the Wudeng yantong ("The strict transmission of the five Chan schools") by Feiyin Tongrong's (15931662), a dharma heir of Miyun Yuanwu. The book placed self-proclaimed Chan monks without proper Dharma transmission in the category of "lineage unknown" (sifa weixiang), thereby excluding several prominent Caodong monks.

Around 1900, Buddhists from other Asian countries showed a growing interest in Chinese Buddhism. Anagarika Dharmapala visited Shaghai in 1893,[web 3] intending "to make a tour of China, to arouse the Chinese Buddhists to send missionaries to India to restore Buddhism there, and then to start a propaganda throughout the whole world", but eventually limiting his stay to Shanghai.[web 3] Japanese Buddhist missionaries were active in China in the beginning of the 20th century.[web 3]

The modernisation of China led to the end of the Chinese Empire, and the installation of the Republic of China, which lasted on the mainland until the Communist Revolution and the installation of the People's Republic of China in 1949.

After further centuries of decline during the Qing, Chan was revived again in the early 20th century by Hsu Yun (), a well-known figure of 20th-century Chinese Buddhism. Many Chan teachers today trace their lineage to Hsu Yun, including Sheng-yen () and Hsuan Hua (), who have propagated Chan in the West where it has grown steadily through the 20th and 21st century.

The Buddhist reformist Taixu propagated a Chan-influenced humanistic Buddhism, which is endorsed by Jing Hui, former abbott of Bailin Monastery.

Until 1949, monasteries were built in the Southeast Asian countries, for example by monks of Guanghua Monastery, to spread Chinese Buddhism. Presently, Guanghua Monastery has seven branches in the Malay Peninsula and Indonesia.[web 4]

Chan was repressed in China during the recent modern era in the early periods of the People's Republic, but subsequently had been re-asserting itself on the mainland, and has a significant following in Taiwan and Hong Kong as well as among Overseas Chinese.

Since the Chinese economic reform of the 1970s, a new revival of Chinese Buddhism is going on.[web 5][web 6] Ancient Buddhist temples, such as Bailin Monastery and Guanghua Monastery have been refurbished.

Bailin Monastery was ruined long before 1949. In 1988, Jing Hui was persuaded to take over the Hebei Buddhist Association, and start rebuilding the Monastery. Jing Hui is a student and dharma successor[web 7] of Hsu Yun, but has also adopted the Humanistic Buddhism of Taixu.[note 5][note 6]

Guanghua Monastery was restored beginning in 1979, when a six-year restoration program began under the supervision of then 70-year-old Venerable Master Yuanzhou (). In 1983 the temple became one of the Chinese Buddhism Regional Temples () whilst 36-year-old Master Yiran () became abbot. The same year, Venerable Master Yuanzhou funded the establishment of the new Fujian Buddhism Academy () on the site.

Several Chinese Buddhist teachers left China during the Communist Revolution, and settled in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Sheng Yen (19302009) was the founder of the Dharma Drum Mountain, a Buddhist organization based in Taiwan. During his time in Taiwan, Sheng Yen was well known as one of the progressive Buddhist teachers who sought to teach Buddhism in a modern and Western-influenced world.

Wei Chueh (19282016) was born in Sichuan, China, and ordained in Taiwan. In 1982, he founded Lin Quan Temple in Taipei County and became known for his teaching on Ch'an practices by offering many lectures and seven-day Ch'an retreats. His order is called Chung Tai Shan.

Two additional traditions emerged in the 1960s, based their teaching on Ch'an practices.

Cheng Yen (born 1937), a Buddhist nun, founded the Tzu Chi Foundation as a charity organization with Buddhist origins on 14 May 1966 in Hualien, Taiwan. She was inspired by her master and mentor, the late Venerable Master Yin Shun (, Yn Shn dosh) a proponent of Humanistic Buddhism, who exhorted her to "work for Buddhism and for all sentient beings". The organisation began with a motto of "instructing the rich and saving the poor" as a group of thirty housewives who donated a small amount of money each day to care for needy families.[98]

Hsing Yun (born 1927), founded the Fo Guang Shan an international Chinese Buddhist new religious movement based in Taiwan in 1967. The order promotes Humanistic Buddhism. Fo Guang Shan also calls itself the International Buddhist Progress Society. The headquarters of Fo Guang Shan, located in Dashu District, Kaohsiung, is the largest Buddhist monastery in Taiwan. Hsing Yun's stated position within Fo Guang Shan is that it is an "amalgam of all Eight Schools of Chinese Buddhism" (), including Chan. Fo Guang Shan is the most comprehensive of the major Buddhist organizations of Taiwan, focusing extensively on both social works and religious engagement.[99]

In Taiwan, these four masters are popularly referred to as the "Four Heavenly Kings" of Taiwanese Buddhism, with their respective organizations Dharma Drum Mountain, Chung Tai Shan, Tzu Chi, and Fo Guang Shan being referred to as the "Four Great Mountains".[100][101]

According to traditional accounts of Vietnam, in 580 an Indian monk named Vintaruci (Vietnamese: T-ni-a-lu-chi) travelled to Vietnam after completing his studies with Sengcan, the third patriarch of Chinese Chan. This, then, would be the first appearance of Thin Buddhism. Other early Thin schools included that of Wu Yantong (Chinese: ; Vietnamese: V Ngn Thng), which was associated with the teachings of Mazu Daoyi, and the Tho ng (Caodong), which incorporated nianfo chanting techniques; both were founded by Chinese monks.

Seon was gradually transmitted into Korea during the late Silla period (7th through 9th centuries) as Korean monks of predominantly Hwaeom (Hangul:; Hanja:) and East Asian Yogcra (Hangul:; Hanja:) background began to travel to China to learn the newly developing tradition. Seon received its most significant impetus and consolidation from the Goryeo monk Jinul () (11581210), who established a reform movement and introduced kan practice to Korea. Jinul established the Songgwangsa () as a new center of pure practice.

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When buddhism arrived in china, the chinese had to find a way talk about make research projects and school reports zen easy with encyclopedia of eastern philosophy religion buddhism, hinduism, work describes as consisting authentic practiced by monks nuns who belong large religious family five main 31 may 2017 what are characteristics buddhism? Appeals american mind, which is iconoclastic anti authoritarian it contents. Religions buddhism zen buddhism. 19 dec 2014 i found that the religion word still sticks a bit in my craw. Common beliefs of zen buddhism; 2 notes is a religion that lives and breathes glory to one's true self. I wasn't interested in the four noble truths, or 3 jul 2012. What is zen? Zen buddhism url? Q webcache. The essence of zen is attempting to understand the meaning life directly, without being misled by logical thought or language (chinese; Pinyin chn) a school mahayana buddhism that originated in china during tang dynasty as chan. Zen buddhism teaches us of the importance living in present what is zen buddhism? Youtube. Religions buddhism zen buddhismwhat is zen? Buddhist beliefszen faq (frequently asked questions). John ankerberg show john. Is zen buddhism a philosophy? . Zen buddhism is a mixture of indian mahayana and taoism. Zen does not seek to answer subjective questions because these zen buddhists do believe in a personal god or divine being that reign on the goes beyond religion; It is free from all religious and dogmatic 2 oct 2002 buddhism. Bbc religions buddhism zen buddhismis a religion or philosophy? Quora. Is zen a religion? Patheos. Zen 101 an introduction to zen buddhism thoughtco. However, religious concepts invariably are entwined with words such as 19 jul 2013 in this essay i want to discuss versus secular meaning buddhist teachings, you can't practice buddhism without others zen is a way and view of life which does not belong any the formal categories modern western thought. It is not a belief, dogma, or religion; But rather, it practical experience. The belief system of zen buddhism is 'zen' an experience or religion? Mindful muscle. Common beliefs of zen buddhism. Zen school was strongly influenced by taoism and developed as a distinct of chinese buddhism if you are asking the question whether is religion, probably but after world war ii especially in 1960s, form zen 24 jul 2017 simple, bare bones introduction to for newcomers that some philosophers texts claimed both religions say not religion buddha way [butsudo]. Zen is not a religion zen secular or religious? Bright way. It is not religion or philosophy; 21 sep 2012 i was suspicious at first, perceiving zen buddhism to be a rather than philosophy. We cannot intellectually grasp zen because human intelligence and wisdom are too for us westerners, this is very different from our christian religion its filled with dogmas. Googleusercontent search. Zen buddhism facts, information, pictures what is zen and how do you practice it? Lion's roar. Is at the

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Is Zen Buddhism A Religion?

1 : a Japanese sect of Mahayana Buddhism that aims at enlightenment by direct intuition through meditation

2 or zen : a state of calm attentiveness in which one's actions are guided by intuition rather than by conscious effort Perhaps that is the zen of gardeningyou become one with the plants, lost in the rhythm of the tasks at hand. Irene Virag

1 : of, relating to, or associated with Zen Buddhism a Zen monk/priest/master

2a : suggestive of the teachings or practice of Zen Buddhism Paddling, itself, is a Zen art: Anyone can do it, yet you can spend a lifetime perfecting it. Jim Albrecht

b : having or showing qualities (such as meditative calmness and an attitude of acceptance) popularly associated with practitioners of Zen Buddhism "I hate to use this word, but Owen is very 'Zen,'" said Rita Nagel, a vice president at Goldman, Sachs. "When some traders start losing money they get nervous. Owen stays very relaxed."

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Zen | Definition of Zen by Merriam-Webster

ZEN . [This article treats the development of the Zen sect in Japan. The historical antecedents of this school, the practices and institutions of Chinese Chan Buddhism, are discussed in Chan.]

The Zen Buddhist sect in Japan consists of three main schools and several additional smaller movements. The largest denomination is the St school, founded by Dgen Kigen (12001253), which has two head temples, Eiheiji in Fukui prefecture and Sjiji in Kanagawa prefecture, and claims nearly fifteen thousand temples, over thirty monasteries and (six) nunneries, and more than eight million adherents, making it one of the largest of the traditional Japanese Buddhist schools. The second largest Zen denomination is the Rinzai school, founded by Myan Eisai (11411215), which is divided into fifteen streams associated with different head temples and claims about six thousand temples, forty monasteries and (one) nunnery, and two million adherents. The largest of the streams is Myshinji temple in Kyoto, which claims about half of the total Rinzai temples and monasteries and over one-third of the adherents. The third Zen school is the baku school, founded by Yinyuan Longqi (Jpn., Ingen Ryki, 15921673), which has a head temple of Manpukuji in the town of Uji outside Kyoto and claims nearly five hundred temples, two monasteries, and under half a million adherents. In addition, there are several modern movements or "brotherhoods" (kydan ) based on Zen meditation or other training techniques that all together claim about one hundred temples and 200,000 adherents.

The Zen sect was first established in the early medieval period as a controversial form of "New Kamakura Buddhism," along with the fledgling Pure Land and Nichiren cults. Zen was proscribed in the 1190s for a few years, and for several decades thereafter it was vigorously opposed by the dominant Tendai sect at Enryakuji temple located on Mount Hiei to the northeast of Kyoto. During the 1240s and 1250s, major Rinzai and St Zen temples were built in Kyoto, Kamakura, and Echizen province, and by the beginning of the fourteenth century, Zen had become the leading religious institution in Japan with an ever-expanding network of temples and a wide-ranging, nearly all-pervasive influence on many different levels of society and culture.

During the late medieval and early modern eras, Zen underwent various periods of apparent decline and renewal, especially when it stood in competition with diverse forms of Japanese religiosity in other Buddhist, as well as Shint and Confucian, movements during the Tokugawa era (16001868). In the modern period, Zen has spread to become a worldwide phenomenon greatly admired for its unique features of spiritual practice, including strict monastic discipline and contemplation of pedagogical riddles, or kans, that have a resonance with contemporary spiritual and intellectual trends in psychotherapy, phenomenology, and environmentalism. At the same time, the Zen sect has received criticism both from within and outside of Japan for contributing to social ills ranging from nationalism and nativism to discrimination against women and outcastes.

The origins of Zen in Japan stem from the Nara and early Heian eras, when sitting meditation and some representative early Chan texts were introduced by monks who had traveled to China, including Saich (767822), and were practiced or studied for several centuries under the auspices of the Tendai sect as one of several styles of training available to novices. Zen began to be established as a separate, autonomous sect by the end of the twelfth century (corresponding to the beginning of the Kamakura era) when several prominent Tendai monks made pilgrimages to the mainland in search of authentic Buddhism after a hiatus in exchange with China that lasted nearly two hundred years. These monks, including Eisai and Dgen, returned with the newly fashioned Song dynasty (9601279) approach to Chan. The style of Song Chan that was brought to Japan included an emphasis on monastic institutional structure and rules of conduct, as well as voluminous texts containing biographies of eminent monks and records of their sayings and dialogues, in addition to extensive poetic and prose commentaries on kan cases.

The earliest Zen schools were created either by Japanese monks who went to China and returned to establish important temples and lineages or by Chinese monks who came to Japan and played a crucial role in the rapid development of Zen. Monks in the first category, in addition to Eisai and Dgen, include: Enni Ben'en (12021280), who studied at Mount Jing, the leading temple of the Chinese Chan Five Mountains (Chin., Wushan ; Jpn., Gozan ) system and became abbot of Tfukuji temple in Kyoto; Shinchi Kakushin (12071298), who introduced to Japan the most prominent kan collection, the Wumen guan (Jpn., Mumonkan ); and Nampo Jmin (also known as Dai Kokushi, 12351308), who received transmission from the Chinese master Xutang (11851269) and created the lineage that founded Daitokuji temple in Kyoto.

Notable among Chinese monks who came to Japan are: Lanxi Daolong (Jpn., Rankei Dry, 12131278), who was the founding abbot of Kenchji temple in Kamakura in 1253 with the support of regent Hj Tokiyori (12261263); Wuan Puning (Jpn., Gottan Run'ei, 11971276), who came at the request of Tokiyori but spent only four years in Japan trying to introduce authentic Chinese-style Zen, serving for a time as abbot of Kenninji temple, which Eisai had founded in Kyoto in 1202 as the first major Zen monastery in Japan; Daxiu Chengnian (Jpn., Daiky Shnen, 12141289), who founded Jchiji temple in Kamakura; and Wuxu Zuyuan (Jpn., Mugaku Sogen, 12261286), who was the founding abbot of Engakuji temple in Kamakura with the support of regent Hj Tokimune (12511284).

Even before Eisai spent four years studying Chan during his second trip to China, which lasted from 1187 to 1191, a monk named Kakua (b. 1142) reached the Chinese mainland in 1171 and, on his return, had an audience with Emperor Takakura (11611181). In response to a question about the meaning of Zen, Kakua responded by simply playing his flute, while the emperor and his retainers looked on in puzzlement. This anecdote is contained in the valuable historical record of Buddhism in Japan, the Genk shakusho, produced by the Zen monk, Kokan Shiren (12781345).

Around the time of Kakua's and Eisai's travels, an anomalous monk not mentioned in Kokan's record, Dainichi Nnin (d. 1196?), started the first organized Zen movement, known as the Daruma school. Nnin was not considered legitimate because he never traveled to China, but instead sent two of his disciples to receive transmission from Zhuan Deguang (11211203) of the Dahui Zonggao lineage. His movement was prohibited by imperial decree in 1194, and its temples were destroyed, although some followers persisted at Hajakuji, a Tendai temple in remote Echizen province (currently Fukui prefecture) until 1241 when they all joined Dgen's upstart St school. Nnin sought to create a pure Zen school free of Tendai esoteric ritualism, but by abandoning requirements to follow the precepts or practice meditation, his approach was accused of antinomian tendencies by both Eisai and Dgen, as well as by Tendai leaders.

Eisai, who is probably best known for introducing tea to Japan, received transmission in the Huanglong (Jpn., ry) lineage of the Linji (Jpn., Rinzai) school of Chan and, like Nnin, tried to create a pure Zen approach in Japan. However, to distinguish his role from Nnin's and gain acceptance from the mainstream Buddhist institution, in the Kzen gokokuron that was composed in 1198 Eisai repudiated the Daruma school's antinomianism and argued for the consistency of Zen meditation with established Tendai practices. Eisai also emphasized the importance of following the Chinese Chan way of administering the mixed precepts (that is, the 250 Hnayna and forty-eight Mahyna precepts), after several centuries in Japan during which only the bodhisattva vows were followed. In the two main temples Eisai established with the support of Hj Masako (11571225)Kenninji and Jufukuji in Kamakurathere was an eclectic training known as Enmitsuzenkai that combined Tendai perfect practice (engy) and esotericism (mitsu or mikky) with Zen-style sitting meditation (zazen ) and disciplinary rules (jukai).

The next major development in the spread of Rinzai Zen involved Enni Ben'en, who like Eisai and Dgen started out studying Tendai Buddhism in Japan and traveled to China from 1235 to 1241 to gain transmission from the Five Mountains temple system. On his return, Enni was awarded the abbacy of Tfukuji temple, constructed along the lines of a grand Song Chan compound. For the first time in the three-quarters of a century since Kakua, a major temple was built exclusively for Zen training with the support of Buddhist and imperial authorities. However, in the end, Tfukuji also provided facilities for the observance of Shingon and Tendai rituals, in accord with the wishes of its patron, Fujiwara Michiie (11921252). Since it was located near Kenninji, Enni often made daily visits and tried to restore the authentic Zen practice that had declined somewhat following the death of Eisai. Tfukuji was also situated near Dgen's first temple, Kshji, in southeast Kyoto. In the following years, Shinchi, who traveled to China from 1249 to 1254, was frequently summoned to lecture on kans and related Zen topics before the imperial court, which further legitimated the Rinzai school.

Based on the intense interest of Hj Tokiyori in promulgating Zen by building Song-style temples and lending other forms of patronage and support, Zen became firmly ensconced in Kamakura, which was the temporary capital for several decades in the thirteenth century. For Tokiyori, Zen was the ideal ideology for the emerging samurai class because of its focus on self-control and creative self-expression in a highly disciplined communal environment. Lanxi and the other monks who arrived from China tended to emphasize the importance of monastic discipline governing every aspect of the daily behavior of monks. Because of their Chinese provenance, the Kamakura temples became the most prominent ones in the Japanese version of the Five Mountains system, outranking Kyoto temples, with the exception of Nanzenji.

Whereas numerous prominent Japanese and Chinese monks were involved in the establishment of the Rinzai school, the development of the St school was primarily based on the efforts of Dgen, who traveled to China from 1223 to 1227 with one of Eisai's disciples, Myzen (11841225). After an itinerant phase during which he traveled around several of the Five Mountains Chan temples in search of an authentic teacher, in the summer retreat of 1225 Dgen gained enlightenment under the tutelage of Caodong (Jpn., St) school master Ju-ching through the experience of "casting off body-mind" (shinjin datsuraku ). On returning to Japan, Dgen stayed for a few years at Kenninji before opening Kshji, which was the first Zen temple in Japan to have a Chan style monks' hall for zazen training, where Dgen began delivering sermons and indoctrinating disciples in Chinese discipline. He preached a message of the universality of enlightenment for all those who practice "just sitting" (shikan taza), including women and laypersons.

At the peak of his career in the summer of 1243, Dgen departed from his temple in Kyoto with a small, dedicated band of disciples and moved to Echizen province, where he established Eiheiji temple. The reasons for the move are obscure, but it seems to be connected with several factors that occurred in the couple of years previous. These include the rapid ascendancy to the Tfukuji abbacy of Enni after his return from China, which may have intimidated Dgen since the massive Rinzai temple dwarfed Kshji, and the conversion of former Daruma school monks at Hajakuji to Dgen's movement, which may have given him an incentive to take up residence in Echizen. Dgen's patron Hatano Yoshishige also owned land in the Echizen region, which was the vicinity of the sacred mountain Mount Hakusan, long a center of yamabushi activity affiliated with a branch of the Tendai sect centered at Onjji (also known as Miidera) temple, east of Kyoto and near Lake Biwa.

During a transitional year, until he settled in the summer of 1244 in his new temple, Dgen was extremely creative in producing over a third of the fascicles included in his major text, the Shbgenz, which consists of informal sermons delivered in the vernacular (kana ) in the abbot's quarters. At Eiheiji, Dgen turned to another style of literature that was included in the Eihei kroku, which consists of formal sermons delivered in the dharma hall in Sino-Japanese (kanbun ), as prescribed by Chinese Chan monastic rules texts. During the Echizen/Eiheiji period, Dgen stressed that enlightenment is available only for male monastics, but he also developed methods for evangelizing and administering precepts to the lay community. According to some reports, Dgen visited Hj Tokiyori in Kamakura for half a year in 1247 to 1248, but he turned down an invitation to head a temple there due to misgivings about the mixing of Zen and the new samurai lifestyle. This would have occurred just a few years before Kenchji was constructed and became a leading Rinzai center under Lanxi.

Much of the difference in the styles of theory and practice that has evolved between the Rinzai and St schools, such as the Rinzai emphasis on kan training and the St emphasis on just-sitting meditation without a focus on kan cases, reflects historical developments subsequent to the formative period of Zen in Japan. The differences tend to stem especially from the Tokugawa and early Meiji eras, periods when all forms of Buddhism had to define themselves in distinctive ways in a competitive religious environment strictly supervised by civil authorities. Discrepancies in style should not be imposed retrospectively, which might obscure the fact that the two schools are linked by fundamental similarities in approach.

On the level of doctrine, both schools stress the importance of post-enlightenment cultivation, as found in Dgen's teaching of shush itt (oneness of practice and realization) and the doctrine proclaimed by Dait Kokushi (Shh Mych, 12821337) of shtaichy (sustained nurturing of the seed of truth). Genuine practice must not end at the time of realization, but should continue after the initial experience of enlightenment and be integrated with each aspect of daily life. This practice can take the form of meditation, performing daily chores on the monastic compound, collecting alms from the lay community (takuhatsu ), participating in the way (d or michi ) of the arts, communing with nature during a mountain retreat (yamazato ), or residing in a secluded hermitage on or off the temple grounds.

For both schools, all aspects of monastery life are governed by the codes of discipline and ethics, as covered in detail in an extensive body of texts dealing with monastic regulations (shingi ). These codes were originally imported from China, most notably the 1103 text, Chanyuan qinggui (Jpn., Zen'en shingi ), which was derivative of early Buddhist Vinaya rules and supposedly based on a much shorter source text attributed to the Tang dynasty master Baizhang (749814), known for his injunction, "a day without work is a day without food." The Chanyuan qinggui was adapted in Japanese texts and required for all monks by numerous thirteenth-century Rinzai and St leaders, including Eisai in 1195, Dgen with several texts beginning in 1237, Lanxi in 1278, and Enni in 1280. The seminal source of Chan rules was also referenced in shingi texts by St master Keizan Jkin (12641325) in 1325, Rinzai master Mus Sseki (12751351) in 1339, and the baku shingi in 1672.

Whether or not it was literally followed, the spirit of "no work, no food" pervades the shingi collections, which include rules on the observance of precepts and ethical conduct, as well as on daily activities and annual ceremonies. These works depict a communal life of meditation, frugality, manual labor, and active debate between master and disciple, with regularly scheduled public assemblies and impromptu lectures and instruction. They also describe the functions of abbot, officers, stewards, rank-and-file monks, and novices, in addition to the management of kitchens, the dharma hall, and the larger monastery estate. The shingi rules provide requirements for the dharma transmission and awarding of seals (inka ), as well as commissioning portraits of masters (chins ) and selecting successors to the abbot. Topics such as quarreling and discipline, wandering, and the role of women are given careful consideration. Furthermore, the relation between a school's head temple (honji ) and branch temples (matsuji ) is delineated in both the shingi records and the laws of the civil society.

Zen monasteries in Japan follow the style of the "seven-hall compound" (shichi-d garan ) originally developed in China. The schema below bears anthropomorphic symbolism in that each of the seven buildings is associated with a part of the Buddha's body, so that entering the temple grounds is considered the equivalent of communing directly with the Buddha. The halls include on the main axis: the mountain gate or entrance associated with the groin, the Buddha hall for displaying icons and hosting banquets associated with the heart, and the dharma hall for sermons before the assembly associated with the head. The right leg is associated with the bathhouse and the right arm with the kitchen, whereas the left leg is associated with the latrine and the left arm with the monks' hall.

Four additional mainstays of the structure of Zen temples are: the abbot's quarters, known as the "ten-foot square hut" (hj), following a passage in the Vimalakrti Stra in which an informed layman holds forth in a humble abode with the ability to outsmart bodhisattvas; the hall to commemorate the local earth deity (djishin ) associated with protection of the temple grounds; a bell tower that houses a large Buddhist bronze bell rung at the New Year and other festivals, as well as purification ceremonies; and a reading room for the study of stras and related Buddhist and literary works. The abbot's quarters is usually located above the dharma hall, with the earth deity hall and bell tower to the right, and reading room to the left.

Life in Zen monasteries is centered on zazen meditation, which is conducted at least four times daily, as well as for longer, more intensive weeklong sessions known as sesshin, especially on special occasions such as Rohatsu (December 8 celebration of the anniversary of the Buddha's enlightenment). During these special occasions, meditation may be prolonged for up to twenty hours a day, leaving time only for minimal sleeping and eating. In addition to the traditional seated posture, there is a form of meditation known as kinhin, which is a walking exercise developed in Japanese Zen.

Another main ingredient of Zen practice is the use of kans as both a literary device and a tool for contemplative training. Diverse styles of commentary were developed during the medieval period (discussed below), involving the use of prose, poetic, and sometimes diagrammatic remarks on the inner meaning of case narratives found in a handful of collections preserved from China, such as the Wumen guan, Biyan lu (Jpn., Hekiganroku ), and Zongrong lu (Jpn., Shyroku ). A new kan exercise developed in Japan is the brief face-to-face interview of the disciple by the master. This is known in the Rinzai school as dokusan (literally "individual study"), which is similar to the St school practice of nyshitsu (literally "entering the room [of the abbot]"). Both terms refer to private instruction in which the teacher evaluates and motivates the aspiring student to attain a higher level of understanding.

Furthermore, nearly all Japanese Zen monasteries and temples have performed a myriad of functions related to the spirits of the dead, including funerary rites that bestow a posthumous ordination name (kaimy ) to ensure that the deceased attains nirva (nehan ) in the afterlife. Zen temples are also involved in memorial services, as well as the annual Obon or Ghost Festival, held either on July 15 or August 15 (the ceremony was originally held at the time of the full moon of the seventh month of the Chinese calendar). It is believed that during this period the spirits of deceased ancestors visit the living, and Buddhist rituals play an important purification function. Despite an apparent emphasis on uniformity and ritualism, several of the most prominent masters of the medieval period were known for a rugged individuality and eccentricity in their commitment to a life of poverty and reclusion, as well as the creative expression of self-awareness.

Beginning with the rise of the new political leadership of the Ashikaga government in 1338, which consolidated its power through alliances with Zen clergy and consciously emulated the Song way of propagating the religion, Zen became a dominant force affecting both the aristocratic elite in the urban centers and the rural population. Zen contributed to the fine, literary, applied, performing, and martial arts, ranging from calligraphy, poetry, gardening, tea ceremony, theater, and sword fighting, among numerous other forms, and also assimilated and domesticated many aspects of popular religion and folklore, including autochthonic gods, demons, and exorcistic rites. Furthermore, Zen began its involvement in constructing the bushid code of honor and loyalty to the warlord by integrating and adapting traditional art of war strategies to monastic training. N theater, which is often based on plays dealing with ghosts of defeated samurai wrestling with demons in the afterlife, and which is written and performed with an uncannily studied contemplative simplicity, represents a realm of the arts where many of these cultural elements have converged.

The developments that took place in establishing Zen in the thirteenth century ensured that the Rinzai school would grow mainly in the Kyoto and Kamakura areas with the support of the shogunate, whereas the St school would spread in the northwestern region, as well as other outlying territories, based on proselytizing to an agrarian population. The two schools were separated by other factors in addition to geography and patterns of patronage and participation, yet there were underlying points of connection both institutionally and in terms of styles of religious practice disseminated through a network of temples known as the Rinka mon-asteries.

The Rinzai school formed the main hierarchical institutional structure known as the Five Mountains system, which was patterned after the Chinese Chan monastery system At its peak it claimed a network of over three hundred temples centered at Nanzenji in Kyoto under the protection of the military regime (bakufu ). The third Ashikaga shogun, Yoshimitsu (13581408), established in 1386 a definitive ranking of five temples each in Kyoto (Tenryji, Shkokuji, Kenninji, Tfukuji, Majuji) and Kamakura (Kenchji, Engakuji, Jufukuji, Jchiji, Jmyji). A head administrative monk (sroku ) was appointed superintendent or the supreme official ruling over the system.

The hallmark of the Five Mountains system was the creation of multiple artistic forms referred to collectively as Gozan bunka, with special emphasis on literature, especially kanbun poetry, known as the tradition of Gozan bungaku. Gozan poetry, which usually consists of four-line verses containing seven characters (kanji ) in each line, deals with Buddhist doctrines and practice, as well as themes that are more general and are used to articulate indirectly an understanding of Zen awareness. One of the main topoi is the contemplation of nature as perceived in secluded landscapes or mountain retreats, as in the following verse by one of the luminaries of the movement, Mus Sseki (12751351):

Autumn's colors dropping from branches in masses of falling leaves, Cold clouds bringing rain into the crannies of the mountains: Everyone was born with the same sort of eyesWhy do mine keep seeing things as Zen kans ? (Pollack, 1985, p. 37).

Mus, founder of Tenryji temple in Kyoto, was immensely successful and popular with all factions as an abbot who gained the attention of Emperor Hanazono and political leaders, monks in training, and the general populace. His book Much mond (Dialogues in a dream) explains Zen in everyday language in response to questions raised by the warrior Ashikaga Tadayoshi. He was said to have left ten thousand followers at the time of his death. However, Mus was also criticized by rivals such as Daitokuji master Dait for not rising above a doctrinal understanding of Zenthat is, for failing to embody a genuinely creative Zen approach that was evident in some of the leading Rinka temple masters.

In addition to the Five Mountains temples of the Rinzai school, which were considered the leading rank in the Zen network, another series of temples that included representatives from both the Rinzai and St schools was known as Rinka or Sanrin temples; both designations refer to "forests" (rin ) of Zen monks. The term, which implies the legions of monasteries in the countryside or hinterlands that were outside, and probably resentful of, the domain of the shogun, is perhaps applied most accurately to Eiheiji and other St temples. But the term is at least in part a misnomer because this group also included prominent Rinzai temples in Kyoto that enjoyed imperial patronage, especially Daitokuji of the Dai-Dait line and Myshinji temple. Myshinji was impressively developed by Dait's disciple, Kanzan Egen (12771360), and eventually it broke off to become an independent head temple that surpassed Daitokuji in the size and scope of its network.

Whereas the Five Mountains temples were known for their poetry, one of the main features of the Rinka temples was the formation of a curriculum of kan studies that took on many different dimensions. Dait is particularly notable for writing two commentaries on the Biyan lu collection of 100 kan cases by using the style of capping phrases (jakugo ), originally developed by Chinese Chan commentators as ironic remarks that illuminate each line of the case narrative. In St Zen, there were various styles of commentary known as shmono, which included formal/public and informal/private styles. One of the main examples of shmono literature was the subgenre of kirigami (literally "strips of paper") commentaries, in which a master would write down quickly an esoteric comment, usually accompanied by a drawing or illustration, that was handed to a disciple as a training tool or an emblem of attaining transmission. Given the transitory quality and secretive nature of this style, the kirigami were left uncollected and were lost until recent scholarship rediscovered and interpreted numerous examples.

A prominent example of medieval Zen art is the famed rock garden at Ryanji temple in Kyoto, which was perhaps designed by the painter Sami (14721525). A classic of the kare-sansui (dry mountains-rivers) style that contains only rocks and sand constructed in patterns but no living form except moss, the Ryanji garden is surrounded by earthen walls in three directions and faced with the corridor of the hj (abbot's quarters) building. In the rectangular space measuring thirty meters from east to west and ten meters from north to south, fifteen rocks of various sizes are arranged on white sand in five groups, each comprising five, two, three, two, and three rocks. The most popular explanation of this garden is that the rocks represent a mother tiger and her cubs, swimming in the river of the white sand toward a fearful dragon. The asymmetric composition achieves a certain balance and harmony that creates energy and rhythm in the midst of subtlety and simplicity.

Another important development of the Rinka period was the way creative Rinzai masters sought to recapture the iconoclasm and eccentricity of early Chinese Chan figures, as epitomized by Ikky (13941481), who was said to have destroyed his transmission seal for being an empty symbol devoid of significance and to have refused to award such a symbol to any of his disciples. Ikky became an acolyte at the age of five and excelled at Chinese poetry and calligraphy as well as painting. Throughout his life he railed against the corruption of priests and the meaningless formalities of Zen monastic life, yet he succeeded to the abbacy of Daitokuji and also won widespread acceptance by the common folk for his inventiveness and independence.

One of Ikky's noted calligraphies contains the saying, "Entering the realm of Buddha is easy, entering the realm of the demon [ma ] is difficult." On one level, this expression, along with Ikky's lifestyle, which included the celebration of visits to brothels and the "red thread" of passion, could be interpreted as endorsing the kind of antinomianism that was consistently rejected by Zen monastic leaders. However, another implication of the saying is that, for Ikky, asserting the priority of purity while occupying a state of transcendence is a relatively simple task that is not necessarily as demanding as maintaining a genuinely authentic state of mind while being tempted and tested in the midst of impurity. An underlying theme is that Buddha and demon are not distinct, but symbolize interior forces of wisdom and delusion that are inextricably and dialectically linked as complementary opposites embraced by a deeper level of nondual awareness.

Within the St school, the fourth generation patriarch Keizan maintained Dgen's twin emphasis on continuing a commitment to rigorous meditation and adhering to monastic regulations, but he also assimilated many elements of Tendai esotericism, as well as folklore religiosity in his approach to Zen. Before joining St, Keizan had been a follower of the remnants of the Daruma school. Through Keizan's efforts, St Zen spread primarily northward from Echizen to the Noto peninsula, where Sjiji temple was established. Long a rival with Eiheiji for the designation of the school's head templeEiheiji enjoyed the prestige of the founder's legacy, but Keizan's temple could claim more than nine times as many branch sitesSjiji was moved at the end of the nineteenth century. It was relocated in a neighborhood outside Yokohama in the Kanto region, which had become over the centuries a major center of St school activity.

A key to the success of this lineage was Keizan's evangelical disciple Gasan Jseki (12751365), who was abbot of Sjiji for forty years. Along with his followers, such as Tsgen Jakurei (13221391), Gasan helped the rapid spread of St Zen in the countryside areas by taking over many abandoned Tendai and Shingon temples and assimilating folklore divinities, which were called upon to protect the welfare of the sacred sites. While greatly concerned with construction projects for bridges, dams, and irrigation canals to help win popular support, Gasan was also a scholastic monk who promulgated the dialectical doctrine of the "five ranks" (go-i) rooted in Chinese texts.

One of the legacies of the popularization campaign is that some of the most prominent St temples are associated with shamanistic and esoteric practices. They are best known to their congregations of lay followers for espousing a syncretic approach to attaining worldly benefits (genze riyaku ), such as prosperity, fertility, or safety during travels, rather than for traditional Zen practices of meditation and monastic discipline. A prime example is Saijji temple near the town of Odawara, which was founded by Ryan Emy (13371411), who was said to have transformed into a winged tengu (the mountain goblin of Japanese lore) to enhance his powers for protection of the temple grounds.

Another such example is Mygonji temple in the town of Toyokawa in Aichi prefecture, anomalously affiliated with Eiheiji rather than Sjiji, which is also called Toyakawa Inari because the main icons on the compound are not images of Buddha but rather the fox deity (Inari), originally a Shint fertility symbol that became a force spiritually protecting the Buddhist teachings. Followers who flood these prayer temples (kit jiin ) for New Year's Day or other annual festivals may not even be aware that rituals and chants are being performed by monks trained at head temples or monasteries, where the primary training is in meditation with the aim of overcoming worldly attachments.

One of the features of medieval St Zen was the role played by female monastics at several nunneries who sought to keep alive the integrity of the tradition of clerical discipline espoused by Dgen, and who also developed unique rituals for healing and purification. It is unclear, however, whether and to what extent Dgen himself endorsed the equality of women, as there are several seemingly contradictory passages in his writings on this topic.

Zen Buddhism during the Tokugawa era was affected by several trends that influenced all Buddhist schools, including the rise of Confucianism and the return to prominence of Shint under the banner of National Learning (kokugaku ) thought. Both ideologies were taught at academies that helped support the rule of the shogunate. The danka (loosely "parish") system in which all families were assigned to a Buddhist temple strengthened the numbers of Buddhist affiliates but tended to weaken the spirituality and integrity of Zen monastic life. It has long been said that Zen apparently entered a prolonged period of decline (daraku ), but the early modern period was actually characterized by many important luminary figures and elements of revitalization.

One of the new developments was the formation of a third movement, the baku school, which was based on the teachings of Chan masters of the Ming dynasty (13681644). The reintroduction of Chinese religion and culture was an anomalous event, since the Tokugawa regime restricted all foreign travel, but Yinyuan and his followers were able to enter Japan after receiving an invitation from Sfukuji in Kyushu and exert great influence. This school emphasizes the preservation of the stras, as well as the combination of zazen meditation with Pure Land, other-power (tariki ) practices for the veneration of Amida (Skt., Amitbha) Buddha, and the recitation of the nembutsu chant, which is generally thought to stand in contrast with the Zen self-power (jiriki ) approach.

The Rinzai school of this period featured several prominent monks, including Takuan Sh (15731645), whose writings synthesize Zen principles of mental cultivation and swordsmanship. This is a form of training in which a warrior must be able to respond to a rival or threat spontaneously and with an unclouded and imperturbable mind that can be attained through meditation. According to Takuan, controlling the battleground and the sense of winning and losing is a matter of mastering the impulses of the mind and casting off fetters and delusions. While Takuan found the Zen mind in the highly specialized world of the warrior, another key monk of the day, Bankei Ytaku (16221693), stressed the role of the mind manifested in ordinary activity, such as walking, standing, sitting, and lying down, which are all exemplary of the imperishable "unborn" Zen state of awareness.

The most important monk of the Tokugawa era was Hakuin Ekaku (16861768), who single-handedly reformed Rinzai school practice in a way that has persisted for over three centuries. Hakuin was known for both his appropriation of the strict training style of the Chinese masters of the Tang and Song periods and his appeal to the common folk, who found him a charismatic spiritual leader. Hakuin perfected a new system of kan study by cataloging and rating the challenging quality of several hundred cases available in the primary collections, as well as creating one of the most famous riddles, "We know the sound of two hands clapping, what is the sound of one hand?" Hakuin gave form to a training method that integrates the techniques of practice sessions (sesshin ) and master-disciple pedagogy (dokusan ), along with public sermons (teish) and capping phrase (jakugo ) commentary provided by the master.

Hakuin also emphasized the role of intense mystical experience in developing Zen awareness. The experience begins with the Great Doubt, in which all perceptions are called into question and stripped away of conventional attitudes. The Great Doubt may seem to lead to a nihilistic state of perpetual anxiety, and this condition is identified by Hakuin as the Zen Sickness, which can affect enlightened and unenlightened alike. However, the goal of the spiritual path is to move beyond debilitating anxiety and attain a more advanced level of insight through experiences that are sudden and dramatic. Hakuin had several instances of subitaneous awakening; for example, it is recorded in his biography, "One night, he sat up in complete absorption until dawn. Suddenly, he heard the bell from a far off temple. As soon as this distant sound entered his ears, it penetrated to the core and made all perceptions of the external world fall away. It was like the ringing of a magnificent bell resounding in his ears."

The St school underwent a significant revival of scholastic studies, producing many new editions and interpretations of the seminal works by and about Dgen's life and thought. Manzan Dhaku (16361714) was the originator of this movement and was responsible for acquiring a new rule of transmission and succession for the post of temple superior from the shogun government. Tenkei Denson (16481735) developed a novel, if idiosyncratic, view of Dgen's Shbgenz by favoring the controversial 60-fascicle edition, and Menzan Zuih (16831769) was the premier cataloger and revisionist of the writings and biographies of Dgen. The St school also published a comprehensive 95-fascicle edition of the Shbgenz in 1690, which was reissued in the early nineteenth century, although the authenticity of this version has been questioned by modern scholars.

The Tokugawa era also saw several highly creative Zen spirits, including the lay practitioner and humanist thinker Suzuki Shsan (15791655), who practiced an unorthodox style of meditation that owed to both samurai culture and Buddhist chanting rituals; the great haiku poet Bash (16441694), who followed a Zen lifestyle as a lay disciple that influenced the inspiration and manner of his verse; and Rykan (17581831), a St monk affectionately called the Great Fool (Daigu) for the childlike innocence expressed in deceptively simple poems that celebrated the Zen values of poverty and nonattachment. Like other early modern Zen leaders who paid obeisance to Chan and early medieval Zen heroes and icons, Rykan expressed his gratitude for Dgen in some of his poetry.

Zen Buddhism in the Meiji era (18681912) was greatly affected by the response of Japanese society to modernization and westernization that resulted in the emerging of a nationalistic, pro-Shint stance and the suppression or modification of traditional Buddhist institutions in several campaigns. These included the persecution of haibustu kishaku, which led to the destruction of Buddhist iconography, the new regulations of shinbutsu bunri, or the separation of Buddhist temples from Shint shrines that had long been amalgamated; and the legislation of nikujiki saitai, forcing marriages and meat-eating upon Buddhist clergy and nearly ending centuries of celibacy and pacifism.

One reaction to the disturbing trends was embodied by tori Sess (18141904), a St monk who worked for the Ministry of Doctrine to modernize Buddhism and eliminate the dissonance between traditional monasticism and secularized, industrialized society. tori was also active in creating linkages between monks and laypersons, and in 1891, the St sect produced an abbreviated version of Dgen's Shbgenz as a source of guidance for lay practitioners. This very short text, the Shushgi, does not even mention the need for zazen but instead emphasizes a life of gratitude and penitence. Several lay or kydan organizations became established as autonomous movements.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Zen had begun to emerge out of the cocoon of the Asia/Pacific cultural context to become a religious phenomenon that was spreading worldwide. Several factors influenced this development. One factor was that immigrant communities in Hawaii, the American West Coast, and Brazil were serviced by missionaries and international outreach components of Zen temple institutions, especially for funerals and memorials.

Another factor was that non-Japanese were introduced to and became fascinated with the philosophy and practice of Zen. A key turning point was the 1893 World Parliament of Religions in Chicago, an interreligious congress that was attended by the widely traveled Shaku Sen (18591919), a disciple of the eminent Rinzai monk, Imakita Ksen (18161892), who was abbot of Engakuji temple in Kamakura. The parliament was also attended by the young D. T. Suzuki (18701966), who served as Sen's interpreter. Suzuki went on to stay for long periods in the United States and have a lengthy career as the main exponent of Zen Buddhism in the West. He published dozens of books in English on various dimensions of Zen in relation to Japanese culture as seen from comparative theoretical perspectives. He also greatly influenced the famous 1956 essay by Alan Watts (19151973) on different styles of the appropriation of Zen practice in the West, "Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen." Famous American Beat poets were indebted to Suzuki, whose role was inherited by Masao Abe (b. 1915), who specialized in interfaith dialogue involving various Western religious traditions.

In the postWorld War II period, historical accounts of Chan and Zen were significantly improved through the scholarship of Yanagida Seizan (b. 1922), a professor of Kyoto University, who was associated with scholars at Komazawa University in Tokyo, which specialized in St studies. Yanagida established an institute for international studies of Zen, as well as mentoring a number of influential Western scholars.

In addition to the efforts of Suzuki, Yanagida, and Abe, among others the spread of international interest in Zen was enhanced by the comparative philosophy of the Kyoto school led by Nishida Kitar (18701945) and his main follower, Nishitani Keiji (19001990). Their works explicating the notion of "absolute nothingness" (zettai mu ) as the key to understanding the Zen experience of enlightenment have been analyzed in relation to leading Western philosophers from ancient to modern times. The significance of Zen thought is now frequently examined in conjunction with the main trends of Western thought.

At the same time, since the 1970s a social criticism of Zen's role in relation to political and cultural affairs has been taken up by commentators in Japan and the West. Ichikawa Hakugen (19021986) was a Rinzai monk writing during the Vietnam War era. Ichikawa reflected on the role of Japan as an aggressor against China in World War II and argued that leaders of Zen, including Kyoto school thinkers who treated the theme of national polity in their works during the 1930s, when they were under considerable political pressure, needed to accept responsibility for contributing to prewar nationalism and imperialism. A movement that began within the St school in 1985 known as Critical Buddhism (Hihan Bukky ) has demanded that Zen temples reform the practice of distributing posthumous ordination names because it discriminates against the outcaste (burakumin ) community. In a related development, St nuns have criticized the misogynist aspect of Zen rules and customs as part of a broader gender criticism of Japanese Buddhism.

A wave of books published in the West beginning in the 1990s, including Brian Victoria's Zen at War (1997), James W. Heisig and John C. Maraldo's Rude Awakenings (1995), Jamie Hubbard and Paul L. Swanson's Pruning the Bodhi Tree (1997), Christopher Ives's Zen Awakening and Society (1992), and Bernard Faure's Chan Insights and Oversights (1993), has called attention to apparent limitations in the Zen view of transcendence. In striving to rise above the pettiness of worldly strife and conflict, Zen may overlookand therefore implicitly sanctionproblematic issues in everyday society. Some elements of this critique were anticipated in the famous novel Temple of the Golden Pavilion (Kinkakuji, 1956) by Yukio Mishima (19251970), which is based on the true story of an acolyte who burned down the most elegant temple in Kyoto. In that sense, the charge of antinomianism leveled at the fledgling Zen movements at the end of the twelfth century has resurfaced in a contemporary context.

Buddhism, articles on Buddhism in Japan, Buddhism in the West; Bushid; Dgen; Eisai; Gozan Zen; Ikky Sjun; Mus Sseki; Suzuki, D. T.

To cite some representative examples of the voluminous literature on Zen in Japanese, important reference works include Zengaku daijiten (Tokyo, 1978); baku bunka jinmei jiten, edited by tsuki Mikio, Kat Shshun, and Hayashi Yukimitsu (Kyoto, 1988); and Zengo jiten, compiled by Koga Hidehiko (Kyoto, 1991). Also, Kza Zen, edited by Nishitani Keiji (Tokyo, 1974) is an important collection of essays, and two historical studies by Tekenuki Gensh are Nihon shushshi (Tokyo, 1989) and Nihon Zenshshi no kenky (Tokyo, 1993). Collections of original sources include Nihon no Zen goroku, 20 vols. (Tokyo, 1977), and two collections edited by Yanagida Seizan, Zengaku ssho, 13 vols. (Kyoto, 19731980), and Zen no goroku, 17 vols. (Tokyo, 19691981).

Information on Zen demographics is included in T. Griffith Foulk, "The Zen Institution in Modern Japan," and in Kenneth Kraft, ed., Zen Tradition and Transition: A Sourcebook by Contemporary Zen Masters and Scholars (New York, 1988), pp. 157177. Standard historical studies in English include Heinrich Dumoulin, Zen Buddhism: A History, Vol. 2: Japan, translated by James W. Heisig and Paul Knitter (New York, 1989), and Daigan Matsunaga and Alicia Matsunaga, Foundation of Japanese Buddhism, Vol. 2: The Mass Movement (Los Angeles, 1978). Cultural criticism of Zen is explored in Bernard Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy: A Cultural Critique of Chan/Zen Buddhism (Princeton, 1991).

Illustrated materials on the early history of the Rinzai school are contained in a partially bilingual catalogue prepared for an exhibit at the Tokyo National Museum of Art on Kamakura Zen no genry (The Art of Zen Buddhism ; Tokyo, 2003). An analysis of the interactions among early Zen movements is discussed in Bernard Faure, "The Daruma-sh, Dgen, and St Zen," Monumenta Nipponica 42, no. 1 (1987): 2555. Works on Dgen include Hee-Jin Kim, Dgen KigenMystical Realist (Tucson, Ariz., 1975); Carl Bielefeldt, Dgen's Manuals of Zen Meditation (Berkeley, 1988); and Steven Heine, Dgen and the Kan Tradition: A Tale of Two Shbgenz Texts (Albany, N.Y., 1994). A selection of Dgen's writings in translation is found in Kazuaki Tanahashi, ed., Moon in a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Dgen, translated by Robert Aitken et al. (San Francisco, 1985).

Institutional practices are discussed in Martin Collcutt, Five Mountains: The Rinzai Zen Monastic Institution in Medieval Japan (Cambridge, Mass., 1981). Intellectual practices of Zen are discussed in T. P. Kasulis, Zen Action/Zen Person (Honolulu, 1980); Miura Issh and Ruth Fuller Sasaki, Zen Dust: The History of Kan Study in Rinzai (Lin-chi) Zen (New York, 1966); Robert Aitken, trans. and ed., The Gateless Barrier: The Wu-men kuan (Mumonkan) (New York, 1991); and Ishikawa Rikizan, "Transmission of Kirigami (Secret Initiation Documents): A St Practice in Medieval Japan," in The Kan: Texts and Contexts in Zen Buddhism, edited by Steven Heine and Dale S. Wright (New York, 2000), pp. 233243. Syncretic practices are discussed in a book dedicated to the 500th anniversary of Saijji, a St temple, Daiyzan: Saijji kais roppyakunen hzan (Kanagawa-ken, Japan, 1994), and Karen Smyers, The Fox and the Jewel: Shared and Private Meanings in Contemporary Japanese Inari Worship (Honolulu, 1998).

The poem by Mus is cited from David Pollack, Zen Poems of the Five Mountains (New York, 1985). Much mond is translated by Thomas Cleary in Dream Conversations (New York, 1994). Other works on this period of Rinzai Zen include Joseph Parker, Zen Buddhist Landscape Arts of Early Muromachi Japan (13361573) (Albany, N.Y., 1999); Kenneth Kraft, Eloquent Zen: Dait and Early Japanese Zen (Honolulu, 1993); and Sonja Arntzen, Ikky and the Crazy Cloud Anthology: A Zen Poet of Medieval Japan (Tokyo, 1987). For an examination of the St school, see William M. Bodiford, St Zen in Medieval Japan (Honolulu, 1993).

An analysis of the development of the baku school is in Helen Baroni, baku Zen: The Emergence of the Third Sect of Zen in Tokugawa Japan (Honolulu, 1998). Zen's relation to samurai culture is discussed in Takuan Sh, The Unfettered Mind: Writings of the Zen Master to the Sword Master, translated by William Scott Wilson (New York, 1988), and Winston L. King, Zen and The Way of the Sword: Arming the Samurai Psyche (New York, 1993). Translations of Hakuin's writings are contained in Philip B. Yampolsky, Zen Master Hakuin: Selected Writings (New York, 1971), and Norman Waddell, Essential Teachings of Zen Master Hakuin (New York, 1994). William M. Bodiford's article treats changes in the transmission process in the St school, "Dharma Transmission in St Zen: Manzan Dhaku's Reform Movement," Monumenta Nipponica 46, no. 4 (1991): 423451. A translation of Rykan is found in Great Fool: Zen Master Rykan: Poems, Letters, and Other Writings, translated by Ryichi Abe and Peter Haskel (Honolulu, 1999).

On changes in Meiji era Zen, see Richard Jaffe, Neither Monk Nor Layman: Clerical Marriage in Modern Japanese Buddhism (Princeton, 2001), and Steven Heine, "Abbreviation or Aberration? The Role of the Shushgi in Modern St Zen Buddhism," in Buddhism and the Modern World: Adaptations of an Ancient Tradition (New York, 2003). The advent of Zen in the West is discussed in Rick Fields, How the Swans Came to the Lake: A Narrative History of Buddhism in America, rev. ed. (New York, 1986). The outlook of modern Zen in a comparative religious context is expressed in Masao Abe, Buddhism and Interfaith Dialogue: Part One of a Two-Volume Sequel to Zen and Western Thought (Honolulu, 1995). For Kyoto school philosophy, see James W. Heisig, Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School (Honolulu, 2002), and Michiko Yusa, Zen and Philosophy: An Intellectual Biography of Nishida Kitar (Honolulu, 2002).

On social criticism, see Ichikawa Hakugen, Bukkysha no sens-sekinin (Tokyo, 1970), and a special (tokush ) issue of the journal Bukky 14, no. 5 (1994). Some of the recent works on a social criticism of Zen in English include Brian A. Victoria, Zen at War (New York, 1997); James W. Heisig and John C. Maraldo, eds., Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism (Honolulu, 1995); Jamie Hubbard and Paul L. Swanson, eds., Pruning the Bodhi Tree: The Storm over Critical Buddhism (Honolulu, 1997); Christopher Ives, Zen Awakening and Society (Honolulu, 1992); and Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights: An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition (Princeton, 1993). Also, a translation of Mishima's novel Kinkakuji (Tokyo, 1956) is by Ivan Morris, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (New York, 1959; reprint, 1994).

Steven Heine (2005)

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No other figure in history has played a bigger part in opening the West to Buddhism than the eminent Zen author, D.T. Suzuki, and in this reissue of his best work readers are given the very heart of Zen teaching. Zen Buddhism, which sold more than 125,000 as an Anchor paperback after its publication in 1956, includes a basic historical background as well as a thorough overview of the techniques for Zen practice. Concepts and terminology such as satori, zazen, and koans, as well as the various elements of this philosophy are all given clear explanations. But while Suzuki takes nothing for granted in the reader's understanding of the fundamentals, he does not give a merely rudimentary overview. Each of the essays included here, particularly those on the unconscious mind and the relation of Zen to Western philosophy, go far beyond other sources for their penetrating insights and timeless wisdom.

What is most important about D.T. Suzuki's work, however--and what comes across so powerfully in these selections--is his unparalleled ability to communicate the experiential aspect of Zen. The intensity here with which Zen philosophy comes to life is without parallel in the canon of Buddhist literature. Suzuki stands apart from all teachers before or since because of his exceptional ability to eloquently capture in words the seemingly inexpressible essence of Zen.

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Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff may have an affinity for Hawaiian culture, but it's a Japanese phrase which holds the most weight when it comes to making big decisions at the $93 billion tech company.

That phrase is shoshin, Japanese for a "beginner's mind," and a tenet of Zen Buddhism. Shoshin refers to an attitude of open-mindedness and endless possibility which many people have when they first start a project or learn something new.

The idea is to never get stuck doing something one way just because it was done that way in the past.

In a call with investors Tuesday after its blockbuster quarterly earnings report, Benioff and chief product officer Bret Taylor both referenced the concept when asked whether Salesforce is committed to exclusively offering its software via the cloud.

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"We're not attached to any sort of religious dogma around the cloud," Benioff said. "We're going to do what's best for our customers and for our company."

When Salesforce was founded in 1999, it was one of the first companies to offer cloud-based software, and one of the first to fully embrace the notion of Software-as-a-Service, or SaaS. Under the SaaS model, a company doesn't need to run software on its own servers, instead accessing it via the internet.

Salesforce's run as a cloud-only company lasted until May when it acquired MuleSoft for $6.8 billion. With the deal, Salesforce got MuleSoft's on-premise offering a version of its services that can be installed on a company's own servers. It's the exact opposite of the cloud model.

While MuleSoft will stay as is, and keep the on-premise offering, both Benioff and Taylor reassured investors that it's not a sign of things to come. Salesforce doesn't plan to move its legacy products to a hybrid-cloud model, which uses a combination of the public cloud and private servers, the executives said.

The executives highlighted the convenience that cloud brings for customers, especially at a company like Salesforce where the service is updated three times a year.

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But with shoshin front of mind, they stopped short of saying Salesforce is definitively a cloud-only company.

Salesforce is on the cloud, Taylor said, "because it means we can deliver innovation to our customers faster," but ultimately that could change if customers' needs evolve to require on-premise services.

"We'll continue to have that beginners mind," Taylor said.

Marc Benioff relies on these monks for guidance here are their tips for holding better, more mindful meetings

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Three Parts:Getting in the Right PositionPracticing the BasicsEasing into a RoutineCommunity Q&A

Meditation can be an invaluable means to de-stress. If you're feeling under pressure, experimenting with meditation can help. Zazen is a type of meditation unique to Zen Buddhism. It involves focusing on the breath and remaining in the present moment. To begin practicing Zen meditation, find a comfortable place and position. Try short sessions where you focus on your breath. With time, develop a routine that works for you. Meditation can be difficult at first, as it takes practice to clear the mind, but you'll eventually find a meditation routine that works for you.

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With Zen mediation, will I experience stillness, in which my mind will not wander anymore?

wikiHow Contributor

Your mind will always naturally wander during meditation, even when you become very experienced. It is not so important to keep your mind from initially wandering; what matters more is being able to catch yourself and regain your focus.

Where can I go to experience Zen Buddhism?

wikiHow Contributor

Some major cities have Zen Centers. Check your local listings for such places, and visit them to see what they have to offer. Otherwise, it is perfectly fine to sit alone and meditate anywhere you find your mind can be most clear.

Can I lie down in a bed and meditate?

wikiHow Contributor

Yes, but you are more likely to fall asleep.

Is it okay to play Zen music?

wikiHow Contributor

It's not required, but there is no "rule" against it. The point of meditation is to clear the mind of distracting thoughts -- if music helps you to do so there is no harm in it.

Is it okay to lean back against a wall while meditating?

wikiHow Contributor

Yes. But try to sit with your back straight. If a cushion on the floor is too difficult, then you can use a chair. It helps the mind to settle and keep awake and clear, and helps the breathing (which should be through the stomach in a relaxed manner). Leaning against a wall contracts the body, making the mind tend to become more heavy and cluttered.

I live in a hostel. How is it possible to meditate in a such crowded and noisy place?

wikiHow Contributor

Get yourself some noise-cancelling headphones. Either wear them silently or play some zen type music or nature sounds like the sea through them. Close your eyes, and put an eye mask on, and focus on your breathing. You will hear nothing outside you and you will see nothing and you will be set to meditate.

Will Zen Meditation help someone who's in prison?

wikiHow Contributor

TM is used in some prisons to help prisoners cope with being behind bars, so Zen Meditation could do the same.

How long and how many times should I do this? Should it be done on an empty stomach?

wikiHow Contributor

How often one meditates is based on preference, though at least once a day for any length of time is preferable. Eating before or after is fine so long as it doesn't interfere with your meditation.

Can I sit in a chair?

wikiHow Contributor

Yes, just be mindful of your posture and that your back is completely straight.

As a Christian, can I still practice Zazen?

wikiHow Contributor

Yes. Not everyone who meditates does so because they adhere to Buddhism. Many people meditate to cope with stress.

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The Best Way to Begin Zen Meditation (Zazen) - wikiHow

Ever since I was a child, I have been acutely sensitive to the idea in the way that other people seem to feel only after bereavement or some shocking unexpected event that the human intellect is unable, finally, to make sense of the world: everything is contradiction and paradox, and no one really knows much for sure, however loudly they profess to the contrary.

It is an uncomfortable mindset, and as a result I have always felt the need to build a conceptual box in my mind big enough to fit the world into. Most people seem to have a talent for denying or ignoring life's contradictions, as the demands of work and life take them over. Or they fall for an ideology, perhaps religious or political, that appears to render the world a comprehensible place.

I have never been able to support either strategy. A sense of encroaching mental chaos was always skulking at the edges of my life. Which is perhaps why I fell into an acute depression at the age of 27, and didn't recover for several years.

The consequence of this was my first book, a memoir called The Scent of Dried Roses. While I was researching it, I read the work of psychologist Dorothy Rowe, a quiet, almost secret, follower of Buddhist philosophy.

Through Rowe's writing I first came across Alan Watts, and he sounded like an unlikely philosopher. His name evoked the image of a paper goods sales rep on a small regional industrial estate. But through Watts and his writing, I was exposed directly to the ideas of Zen Buddhism. I was suspicious at first, perceiving Zen Buddhism to be a religion rather than a philosophy. I wasn't interested in the Four Noble Truths, or the Eightfold Path, and I certainly didn't believe in karma or reincarnation.

All the same, I read a couple of Watts's books. They made a significant impact on me. The Meaning of Happiness (published in 1940) and The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951) are striking primers to his work, and they underlined what Rowe was already teaching me: that life had no intrinsic meaning, any more than a piece of music had an intrinsic point. Life was, in zen parlance, yugen a kind of elevated purposelessness.

The word "zen" is a Japanese way of pronouncing "chan", which is the Chinese way of pronouncing the Indian Sanskrit "dhyana" or "sunya", meaning emptiness or void. This is the basis of zen itself that all life and existence is based on a kind of dynamic emptiness (a view now supported by modern science, which sees phenomena at a sub-atomic level popping in and out of existence in a quantum froth).

In this view, there is no stuff, no difference between matter and energy. Look at anything closely enough even a rock or a table and you will see that it is an event, not a thing. Every thing is, in truth, happening. This too, accords with modern scientific knowledge. Furthermore, there is not a multiplicity of events. There is just one event, with multiple aspects, unfolding. We are not just separate egos locked in bags of skin. We come out of the world, not into it. We are each expressions of the world, not strangers in a strange land, flukes of consciousness in a blind, stupid universe, as evolutionary science teaches us.

The emphasis on the present moment is perhaps zen's most distinctive characteristic. In our western relationship with time, in which we compulsively pick over the past in order to learn lessons from it, and then project into a hypothetical future in which those lessons can be applied, the present moment has been compressed to a tiny sliver on the clock face between a vast past and an infinite future. Zen, more than anything else, is about reclaiming and expanding the present moment.

It tries to have you understand, without arguing the point, that there is no purpose in getting anywhere if, when you get there, all you do is think about getting to some other future moment. Life exists in the present, or nowhere at all, and if you cannot grasp that you are simply living a fantasy.

For all zen writers, life is, as it was for Shakespeare, akin to a dream transitory and insubstantial. There is no "rock of ages cleft for me". There is no security. Looking for security, Watts said, is like jumping off a cliff while holding on to a rock for safety an absurd illusion. Everything passes and you must die. Don't waste your time thinking otherwise. Neither Buddha nor his zen followers had time for any notion of an afterlife. The doctrine of reincarnation can be more accurately thought about as a constant rebirth, of death throughout life, and the continual coming and going of universal energy, of which we are all part, before and after death.

This is an extract fromAeon Magazine,a new digital magazine which publishes a free original essay every weekday on science, art, nature and culture.You can read Tim Lott's essay on Zen Buddhism and Alan Watts in fullhere.

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Zen Buddhism teaches us of the importance of living in the ...

Since the beginning of time, man is searching for the truth. Thousands of years ago, our ancestors, sat under the stars, and around the campfire discussed and asked themselves the same questions we ask ourselves today. Who am I? Why am I here? Is there a God? Is there life after death? Are we alone in the Universe?

Zen is very pragmatic and down to earth. It is essentially a practice, an experience, not a theory or dogma. Zen adheres to no specific philosophy or faith, and has no dogma that its followers must accept or believe in, but it traditionnally accept the concepts of karma and samsara. For us westerners, this is very different from our Christian religion and its filled with dogmas.

Zen does not seek to answer subjective questions because these are not important issues for Zen. What really matters is the here and now: not God, not the afterlife, but the present moment here and now.

Moreover, Zen firmly believes that nobody knows the answers to those questions and that they are impossible to answer because of our limited condition. Life is a dream, a grand illusion that we perceive through the filter of our personality, our experiences, our ego. This is a great piece of theater in which we do not see all the actors and in which we barely understand the role of those that we see.

Zen gladly accepts the idea that men are only men and nothing more. Man, being what he is, cannot answer life's impossible questions without falling into the trap of illusion. No one knows the answers to the deep questions about life and death.

These questions are impossible to answer, given the limited sphere of knowledge that comes with the condition of being a human being. As Master Taisen Deshimaru said, "It is impossible to give a definite answer to those questions, unless you suffer from a major mental disorder."

Does this mean that Zen closes the door to metaphysical phenomena? Absolutely not! Zen cannot confirm nor deny them, therefore, it is better to remain silent and to live simply in the moment.

What does Zen think of religions beliefs then? As a great Zen Master once said, "Faith is like painting the walls of your room with mud, then trying to convince yourself that it is beautiful, and it smells good". Faith is an illusion, a dream that we strongly consider real, but that in reality only impoverishes the true spirituality of man. The strength of our faith and conviction has nothing to do with the fact that a belief is true or not. The veracity of our faith is in us only, nowhere else.

Religions feel compelled to give answers to everything as a sign of their "great wisdom", but for Zen, not giving any answer at all is actually the great wisdom.

A true religion shows man how to think and not what to think, therefore, we must learn to ask great questions rather than looking for great answers.

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ZEN BUDDHISM | Beliefs | Buddhist beliefs

In Zen Buddhism, zazen (literally "seated meditation"; Japanese: ; simplified Chinese: ; traditional Chinese: ; pinyin: zu chn; WadeGiles: tso4-ch'an2, pronounced [tswoan]) is a meditative discipline that is typically the primary practice.[1][2] The precise meaning and method of zazen varies from school to school, but in general it can be regarded as a means of insight into the nature of existence. In the Japanese Rinzai school, zazen is usually associated with the study of koans. The St School of Japan, on the other hand, only rarely incorporates koans into zazen, preferring an approach where the mind has no object at all, known as shikantaza.[3]

Zazen is considered the heart of Japanese Soto Zen Buddhist practice.[1] The aim of zazen is just sitting, that is, suspending all judgmental thinking and letting words, ideas, images and thoughts pass by without getting involved in them.[3][5]

In Zen temples and monasteries, practitioners traditionally sit zazen as a group in a meditation hall, usually referred to as the zendo. The practitioner sits on a cushion called a zafu,[2] which itself is usually placed on top of a low, flat mat called a zabuton.[2]

Before taking one's seat, and after rising at the end of the period of zazen, a Zen practitioner performs a gassho bow to their seat, and a second bow to fellow practitioners.[6]

The beginning of a period of zazen is traditionally announced by ringing a bell three times (shijosho), and the end of a round by ringing the bell either once or twice (hozensho).

Long periods of zazen may alternate with periods of kinhin (walking meditation).[7][8]

The posture of zazen is seated, with folded legs and hands, and an erect but settled spine.[9] The hands are folded together into a simple mudra over the belly.[9] In many practices, the practitioner breathes from the hara (the center of gravity in the belly) and the eyelids are half-lowered, the eyes being neither fully open nor shut so that the practitioner is neither distracted by, nor turning away from, external stimuli.

The legs are folded in one of the standard sitting styles:[2]

In addition, it is not uncommon for modern practitioners to practice zazen in a chair,[2] often with a wedge or cushion on top of it so that one is sitting on an incline, or by placing a wedge behind the lower back to help maintain the natural curve of the spine. One can sit comfortably, but not too comfortably, so as to avoid falling asleep. While each of these styles is commonly taught today, Master Dogen recommended only Kekkafuza and Hankafuza.

In his book Three Pillars of Zen, Philip Kapleau says that practitioners in the Rinzai school face in, towards each other with their backs to the wall, and in the Soto school, practitioners face the wall or a curtain.[10] Kapleau quotes Hakuun Yasutani's lectures for beginners. In lecture four, Yasutani describes the five kinds of zazen: bompu, gedo, shojo, daijo, and saijojo (he adds the latter is the same thing as shikantaza).[11]

Very generally speaking, zazen practice is taught in one of three ways.

Koan practice is usually associated with the Rinzai school and Shikantaza with the St school. In reality many Zen communities use both methods depending on the teacher and students.

The initial stages of training in zazen resemble traditional Buddhist samatha meditation in actual practice, and emphasize the development of the power of concentration, or joriki[12] () (Sanskrit samdhibala). The student begins by focusing on the breath at the hara/tanden[13] with mindfulness of breath (npnasmti) exercises such as counting breath (ssokukan ) or just watching it (zuisokukan ). Mantras are also sometimes used in place of counting. Practice is typically to be continued in one of these ways until there is adequate "one-pointedness" of mind to constitute an initial experience of samadhi. At this point, the practitioner moves to one of the other two methods of zazen.

Having developed awareness, the practitioner can now focus his or her consciousness on a koan as an object of meditation. Since koans are, ostensibly, not solvable by intellectual reasoning, koan introspection is designed to shortcut the intellectual process leading to direct realization of a reality beyond thought.

Shikantaza is a form of meditation, in which the practitioner does not use any specific object of meditation;[3] rather, practitioners remain as much as possible in the present moment, aware of and observing what passes through their minds and around them. Dogen says, in his Shobogenzo, "Sitting fixedly, think of not thinking. How do you think of not thinking? Nonthinking. This is the art of zazen."[14]

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Zazen - Wikipedia