The quote is more or less accurate, if lacking nuance. Ch'an Buddhism (zen) was more or less a 5th century Chinese development. It was the fusion between Madhyamika influenced Mahayana and Taoist practices. Bodhidharma, the semi-legendary (some say fictional, I believe not entirely) founder was from outside China (sources disagree on whether he was Persian or South Indian), and there is profound influence from Madhyamika writings in Ch'an. However, Ch'an's connection Bodhidharma is also somewhat tenuous. The central text of early Ch'an was the Lankavatara Sutra, written in the fourth century in India by Yogachara monks, supposedly brought by Bodhidharma to China. Later Ch'an and Zen lineage holders would trace an uninterrupted line back to the Buddha and feature the major names of Mahayana in India and show it moving to China, this is innacurrate in the sense tha Buddhism had no patriarch or established center and Ch'an meditation and techniques weren't established, as they claim, by the Buddha.

Ch'an's formal history begins in seventh century China with Hung-Jen and his student, Chen-Hsui. They established the first major Ch'an monastery and codified the meditative techniques. They were very popular and invited to the court of the Empress. Ch'an is almost entirely a Chinese development, with meditation influenced by both T'ien-Tai and Daoism. This does not mean Ch'an has no basis in Buddhism, no they interpret the texts from a different mindset, favoring direct insight as the highest form of enlightenment.

Ch'an spread to Vietnam and Korean first in the tenth century and Thien and Son, more or less untouched. It went to Japan in the twelth via the efforts of Myoan Eisai, but in a corrupted form sycretised further with his on Tendai. Dougen Kigen brought the current Ch'an texts to Japan and reformed Zen a century later. Zen sitting became the central method of Japanese Zen by his influence and diverged from Chinese Ch'an in the following centuries. Notably, the Zen monastic tradition more or less disintegrated in the nineteenth century when monks were disrobed and made it so monks faced pressure to marry and convert to Shinto. As a result, Zen monks became priests and often practiced as a side activity.

Modern Zen in the West comes from the efforts and writings of DT Suzuki in the postwar era. Zen is largely based on a glorified form of Renzai which was the iconoclastic side. Suzuki himself often emphasized the practical and aesthetic part of Zen while downplaying ascetic and monastic practice as well as textual scholasticism.

So yes, Zen is not an Indian development but the Japanese version of a Chinese development in Buddhism. Western Zen deviates further by de-emphasizing nearly all historic Ch'an and Zen monasticism and asceticism for practical practice and is largely a postwar Japanese-American development.

Sources

• The Buddhist Religion: A Historical Introduction, 4th edition by Richard Robinson and Willard L. Johnson

• Buddhism in China: A historical Survey by Kenneth Ch'en